


Love. Be Afraid. (Episode 1)

by Nevcolleil



Series: The Gift [1]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teen Wolf (TV) Fusion, M/M, Past Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel, Werewolves, blam friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-27 16:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13884828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: When Blaine dreams that night he's back in the woods.He's falling onto damp soil and crabwalking backwards, desperate, trying to run from the massive beast ruffling its fur and baring its fangs at him - except Blaine can't even rise to his shaky knees, much less get back on his legs...The wolf hunches down on its hindquarters, the thick muscle in its flanks tensed like it could launch itself at Blaine at any moment-The foggy woods are just the same as they were then, a dark canopy overhead and fresh earth underneath. The same wispy moonlight illuminates everything...The wolf is there inside it, watching, fangs exposed - but it doesn't look like it's preparing to pounce, this time. It isn't growling or snarling; no drool drips down its terrifying teeth.The fangs aren't a sign of aggression. They're a display of power, somehow Blaine understands that. He can see it in the wolf's glowing green eyes.And the wolf is waiting for Blaine to come to him.[a.k.a. the Seblaine Teen Wolf fusion I have been procrastinating about writing since 'The Sinners & The Saints' finished. Now reworked as one chapter.]





	Love. Be Afraid. (Episode 1)

**Author's Note:**

> Bare with me on this crazy crossover/fusion I just need to exorcise and get out of my head. You don't have to have seen any of Teen Wolf - or Glee - although if you have you may be able to guess about certain major events to come for our characters, and the characters' roles themselves. (*May* be. I do switch things up a bit, here and there.)
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts on this. Feedback is the fuel that keeps my train of thought running til a fic is finished. :) Thanks so much for clicking the link on this fic and giving it a shot!
> 
> [And if you found this via a link on Tumblr, I'm sorry for the weird disappearing chapters. I have reorganized this fic now, so the updates will be longer.]

Honestly, Blaine wasn’t even supposed to _be_ in those woods that morning - the woods that border three sides of McKinley High’s athletics stadium - not alone.

It was their reserved rehearsal time in the auditorium, his and Sam’s, and Blaine had sacrificed dearly to get the reservation.

“Eleven o’clock _p. m._ ,” he’d reacted, flabbergasted, when Sue gave him their first spot. “That’s at _night_.”

“Oh, look. Pretty _and_ he can tell time,” Sue cracked back, with absolutely no sympathy. “That’s right, sweet cheeks. That’s what you get when you wait to the last minute to reserve your rehearsal time.”

Sue had only started accepting reservations that morning - sixth period was hardly ‘last minute’, but Blaine knew that arguing _that_ point was a dead end.

“We can’t rehearse at eleven o’clock at night,” he insisted.

“Why, past your bedtime?” Sue asked. “Just ask Mommy and Daddy to give you an extension for the next couple of weeks, and you’ll be fine.”

Sue says and does some remarkably crass, even borderline _cruel_ , things on a daily basis - to her students, to her fellow faculty. Even to her boss, poor Principal Figgins. But she always, arguably, keeps her shots above the belt, and usually has some totally justified reason (even if the justification only makes sense in her own head) for taking them.

Blaine’s kept the truth about his parents a secret at McKinley as best he can, but he wasn’t sure until that moment whether or not Sue had managed to find out the truth anyways.

Well. He was relatively sure. It was possible Sue _had_ developed a grudge against him, somehow. There couldn’t possibly be _no_ spots left in the rehearsal schedule except for eleven o’clock p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

“You’re telling me there’s not a single hour open that the auditorium isn’t already reserved, all week,” Blaine pressed. “Not a _single_ one?”

Sue leaned back in her seat, the fabric of her red and white track suit rustling, and considered Blaine as if eying up a potential witness. “I’m saying there’s not a single hour open that the auditorium isn’t already reserved... for those who need it most,” she said finally, an evasive note in her voice that Blaine was not at all surprised to hear.

‘Uh huh. Just like I thought.’ “What’s that supposed to mean?” he dared ask.

“It means my athletes in the choir need time during the day to get their assignments done,” Sue said. “They don’t have time for that nonsense after school, they’re at practice. At night, they’re engaging in Sue Sylvester’s Personal Program for Home Fitness, as prescribed. And for the three precious hours they have left to sleep after that, before they’ve got to be up at the crack of down for morning calisthenics, they are resting their fittingly tired bones. They get dibs on prime time rehearsal scheduling. Sorry.”

That was-

There was so much wrong with that, Blaine almost didn’t know where to begin.

 _Almost_.

“Non- _You’re_ our choir teacher. _You_ assigned us these performances! They’re not nonsense,” Blaine argued.

“I hate being the choir teacher,” Sue responded immediately, in her most matter-of-fact tone. “I would never have taken the position if Figgins hadn’t required it as a term for revoking my temporary suspension.”

Blaine wisely avoided that issue altogether. He’s heard Sue’s thoughts on her near-suspension many, many times. They all have.

‘Bring home a national cheer championship trophy, three years in a row, and you’re a god amongst mortals,’ Sue’s ranted more than once. ‘Fire one kid out of a canon doing it, and suddenly you’re being accused of child endangerment. Make up your mind, people!’

“And _I’m_ one of your athletes,” Blaine reminded her. “I’ve been doing the Sue Sylvester Personal Program for Home Fitness for years. I’m at practice everyday. I’m cheer _captain_! You know that!”

Blaine doesn’t, admittedly, do the SPPFHF (it’s not a very catchy acronym, but it works as well as any) very well. He shortens his routine so he has time for his skin care regimine every night - and time to do his hair in the mornings - and enough time to sleep for five hours instead of three.

“Aw, you’ve been half-assing the program all summer,” Sue says. “But even if you weren’t, I’m not worried about you. You could sing and dance that number half-asleep, with your tongue tied and Evans clinging to your oddly delicate ankles - and _still_ execute a perfectly timed basket throw at the next pep rally.”

Blaine’s known Sue long enough to roll with the proverbial punches of her style of conversation, so he didn’t waste time glancing at his ankles (much) or challenging her backhanded compliments, nice as they were (coming from Sue).

“Sam and I are nowhere near comfortable with our choreography,” Blaine tried to tell her. “And we’re planning to use that set in competition.”

Sue only yawned. She was getting that look on her face she always gets before either insulting Principal Figgins, suggesting something for a routine that’s likely to result in a minor physical injury, or standing up and announcing that she’s said all she has to say on the subject (even if she hasn’t actually said anything) and storming out. Sometimes with a loud slam of a door or after tilting over some small piece of furniture.

“Plus, Sam’s an athlete, too,” Blaine said. “He has practice after school, and then he works. And on Fridays, he has football-”

Abruptly, Sue slammed both her hands down on top of her desk, and yelled “Aha!” at the top of her voice.

Blaine practically jumped out of his chair.

“ _Exactly_ ,” Sue said. “ _Sam_ is on the football team. The McKinley High School Titans’ football team - or should I say _Tight Odds_ , because the odds of them _ever_ finishing out a successful season for any other reason than if every _single_ one of their competitors suddenly and mysteriously contracted a lingering yet curable disease... lasting the duration of the football season.. are about as likely as the odds of my ever taking back my no-good ex-lover, Grammy-winning musical artist Michael Bolton. Astronomical, Anderson. Absolutely out of the realm of consideration.”

Sue stapled her fingers together on top of her desk. “But they have to try, Blaine,” she said. “They have to try, and eventually, they have to get better. And do you know why they have to get better, Blaine?”

Blaine was starting to guess. And to feel foolish, because he really should have known.

“So they don’t make the cheer squad look bad?” he suggested.

“So they stop making the cheer squad look bad!” Sue exclaimed. “They have _got_ to get their shit together, and they’re not gonna do that if they have to give up precious practice hours to hop and prance around the auditorium singing poppy showtunes.”

Blaine asked only one more question. “Well, if that’s your reason, shouldn’t Sam and I _still_ get one of the better spots. Since he’s on the team?”

Sue crossed her arms. ‘If I didn’t know better,’ Blaine remembers having thought, ‘I’d think she was... pouting.’

“Guess you should have sent Pillowtop Lips in to ask,” she said very evenly. “I mean... Since he’s on the team.”

And that’s how Blaine ended up joining the McKinley High Titan football team.

Sam owes him _so_ much for getting them a Saturday morning rehearsal block, and he wasn’t even with Blaine for the first one!

Not that Blaine can hold that against Sam, now... In fact, Blaine is actually extremely grateful that Sam blew him off for a spontaneous date with Brittany. Because if he hadn’t... They might both be in this situation.

Whatever this “situation” Blaine’s found himself in actually is.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|

 

“Werewolf,” Sam calls it, right away.

Blaine is the one who has to bite down on a fond smile, because- Seriously?

“Werewolf?” Blaine repeats.

Sam doesn’t look like he’s joking. In fact, Blaine realizes - smile softening with only more fondness - he looks really, genuinely concerned.

“What _wolf_ wolf is as big as the one you saw?” Sam asks. “Huh?”

“It was dark, Sam,” Blaine admits. “The wolf... wolf might have just _looked_ abnormally big.” 

Sam says Blaine described the wolf as being huge - ‘It’s paws, Sam... it’s- it’s paws were as big as my head! Oh my god...’ - but Blaine can’t even remember their call. 

He’d been half asleep Saturday morning - up too late doing his SSPPFHF (Blaine Anderson has never _half-assed_ anything in his _life_ ) and it had been a dark, foggy morning. With the canopy of treetops overhead, it had been almost as dark as night in the woods. 

Blaine took his usual shortcut to the school - across the park, through the southernmost edge of the reserve that sits on one end of the woods, exiting out directly in front of the MHHS athletics stadium - but he must have wandered off his usual path. 

That’s where he encountered the wolf.

Now he only remembers bits and pieces of what happened next. A terrifying howl... the glint of waning moonlight shining off of smoke-gray fur... A searing pain in his left arm, and teeth-

Blaine shudders when he thinks about it. He must have run back home, and collapsed back into his bed, because he woke up well after noon, when Sam dove on top of his covers and started hitting him with a pillow. 

‘Dude. You scared the _crap_ out of me!’ he yelled, punctuating his words by pummeling Blaine with memory foam. ‘No. Prank. Calls. During. Dates, remember? Even last minute breakfast dates... whiiiich I just remembered was supposed to be Blam rehearsal time. Shit. I am so, _so_ sorry, bro. Oh my god. I suck as a project partner and a bro.’

Then Blaine sat up and Sam saw what was left of Blaine’s left shirt sleeve. The red staining the cotton and Blaine’s skin, and even the sheets that he’d slept in-

‘Wait... Is that _blood_?’

Blaine spent most of Saturday afternoon calming Sam down from a major freak out because - ‘Look, Sam. _Sam_. The bite barely even broke the skin... See? I’m fine. You’ve got to breathe.’ - and internally supressing his own major freak out. (What bite _doesn’t_ break the skin, but bleeds that much? It was almost like the wolf _had_ bitten Blaine... but the wound had healed. In a matter of hours. That isn’t possible.)

Sam didn’t leave Blaine’s side for the rest of the weekend. This morning he wouldn’t even let Brittany drive him to school. 

And Blaine appreciates his best friend’s concern... He really, really does.

But he’s starting to wonder if putting all of his energy into being overprotective over Blaine isn’t giving Sam delusions.

“Werewolves aren’t real, Sam,” Blaine says with certainty.

With... mostly certainty. The blood was-

Weird. But-

“Bites don’t magically go away overnight after bleeding like that, B,” Sam says, sounding even more certain than Blaine, which is _especially_ surreal considering what they’re talking about. “Not a bite from a _wolf_ wolf.”

“We have to stop saying _wolf_ wolf,” Blaine remarks as they reach his locker. They’re starting to sound ridiculous.

Not that any conversation about _werewolves_ (oh my god) could be anything but.

“Saturday, just _hours_ after getting bit, your bite didn’t even look that bad,” Sam just keeps saying. “Yesterday, it was barely a scratch. Today, it’s gone! How do you explain that, Blaine? Huh? I’m telling you, dude, _you got bit by a werewolf_!”

Blaine collects his books for first period, checks the hold on his hairgel in the mirror in his locker (it’s not good - one front curl keeps breaking loose no matter how Blaine fights to subdue it; damn this humid weather) and drags Sam to his own locker to get ready for class.

Sam is listing all of the “research” they need to do on Blaine’s “condition” as he does.

“-moon. Like, I don’t even know what moon we’re on right now, dude! And what about silver? Will it kill you? Make you sick? Blaine, we already ordered our school rings... In _silver_!”

“I don’t think my school ring is going to kill me, Sam,” Blaine says calmly. 

Like the time when Sam “married” Brittany to avert the Mayan Apocalypse (don’t ask), sometimes - Blaine’s learned - the only way to go with one of Sam’s zanier ideas is through.

“Yeah, but we don’t _know_ ,” Sam insists, just as Tina Chang appears at the end of the hall, eyes lighting up when she sees Sam and Blaine and hurries in their direction.

“Hey, Blai- Blai... Blainey-boo, S-Sammy Bear,” Tina stutters, in one of her usual, cheerful greetings. “Have you hea- Have you hear- heard the news?”

Blaine waits patiently for Tina to build up to the whatever she’s obviously dying to tell them. Blaine knows few people - even among the teenagers who go to their school - who love drama as much as their Tina.

He determinedly resists looking at Sam, who’s moved behind Tina to gesture emphatically at Blaine from over her shoulder without her seeing. Presumably, those awkward hand signals mean that Sam doesn’t want Blaine to mention anything to Tina about his Saturday morning run-in with a wolf in the wilds that surround McKinley - or about his supposed new lycanthropy problem.

There really isn’t any danger of Blaine’s doing that. At all.

“What news, Tin-Tin?” Blaine asks. 

“We’ve got a n- n- new s-student,” she says like that’s any kind of news at all, even in as small a school as McKinley - while her eyes promise that it really is. “F-from _Dalton_.”

Now _that_ is news.

“Whoa, really?” Sam asks, having given up on his attempt at secret-keeping charades. “I thought all the Dalton kids were out of Beacon County for good.”

“N-not, not this one,” Tina tells them, looking even more pleased to be sharing the gossip now that she knows she’s the first one to reach them with it. “H-he c- ca- he came back.”

A familiar wash of emotions flood over Blaine at the mention of Dalton Academy, so strong that Blaine just about zones out while Tina and Sam discuss what grade the new student is in (theirs), how she knows he used to go to Dalton (she overheard it in the office, while she was helping Artie get his class schedule), and whether or not they think he’s going to try out for choir (Blaine totally misses what either of them have to say about that.) 

Dalton Academy is a tragic subject - both for Blaine personally, and just in general.

Dalton is - or _was_ \- _the_ private school to attend in Ohio for students planning to one day pursue a career in the performing arts. The Dalton Academy Warblers were the top high school choir in the state - even winning Nationals many times over the fifty year history of the school’s show choir program. 

In Freshman year, when... everything happened, Blaine begged his parents to send him to Dalton. He researched the school extensively. He even visited the campus and got lots of flyers to stick in his father’s briefcase or his mother’s purse. All he wanted was for them to at least _consider_ letting him change schools. He tried to focus his arguments entirely on the school’s academic successes, and its show choir credentials, but something more must have bled through in his voice. In his eyes. 

Maybe he shouldn’t have brought up the school’s no-bullying policy at all.

Blaine’s father had pressed, and when Blaine had broken down and explained why he thought the attack he’d suffered after that year’s Sadie Hawkin’s Day dance might happen again if he stayed at McKinley, whatever Principal Figgins said or did - when Blaine came out - instead of sending him to the school of his choice, Blaine’s parents disowned him. 

He’s been living with Sam and his family ever since.

And last year Dalton Academy burned to the ground, with many of its students and some of its faculty still inside.

Blaine may very well be alive today because his parents hated him so much that, when they cast him out, they let him take his things with him - they set up a trust fund for him to live off of... but on the single condition that he remain at McKinley High School. They even put it in writing when they established the trust. If Blaine had tried to transfer _himself_ to Dalton, as soon as he wrote his first check for tuition, he would have lost his entire trust and been unable to afford to eat, much less pay for another three years of private school education.

The knowledge sits heavily in Blaine’s gut. He feels grateful to his parents, although obviously they hadn’t known that their pettiness would one day save him; and he feels bitter. He feels guilty because he can _be_ grateful, or he can _be_ bitter. He’s alive, and all of those other boys- All of those boys who were so much like him-

They all died. In such a horrible, horrible fashion.

Blaine had envied them, and then they had died, and now he doesn’t know how to feel that one of them has actually come _back_ to Beacon County. Perhaps not to Westerville, where Dalton Academy stood, but here to its neighbor, Beacon Hills. To McKinley High School, Dalton’s one-time show choir rival. (Dalton was the _best_ , but McKinley’s never been bad.)

“-why, though. I thought everyone with a kid at Dalton sent them off somewhere else or moved them here a year ago,” Sam is saying when Blaine tunes back in.

‘Everyone with a kid whose kid survived,’ Sam means, but of course Blaine understands what he’s saying. Dalton used to board students from all over the place, so most of its surviving student body did leave the county - even the state - when it was announced that the school wouldn’t be rebuilt. A few students came here to McKinley, but they were all seniors, and after they graduated - as far as Blaine knows - they all moved away as well.

“I d-don’t know, b-but he’s he- here,” Tina maintains. 

Blaine is entirely too distracted, all throughout first period, thinking about the mysterious ‘he.’

Thinking about what Blaine would say to him, if he got the chance. 

Blaine wouldn’t have to say anything... It’s not like he has any more connection to this boy who once attended the school Blaine used to wish he could attend than anyone else at McKinley. Their only connection is in Blaine’s head. He mourns the school he would have gone to, if he could have - the boys he might have made friends with, sat through classes with, and sung beside on stage. 

This boy... he went to that school. He lived there. Those boys were his friends. His classmates, his stage partners. And he attended their funerals. There’s nothing Blaine can say to him.

Nothing Blaine should probably want to say besides the usual - the ‘I’m so sorry’s that probably everyone always says, and no one in the position of receiving one ever wants to hear.

If they don’t have any classes together, and the boy doesn’t join the choir, Blaine might never even speak to the boy, so it really doesn’t make any sense that Blaine sits through English III without hearing half of what his teacher says, thinking about the possibility. 

Or so he tries to tell himself, as he walks into AP Bio second period, determined to do better this hour. To get his head out of the clouds and on what he’s doing for the day. This is only the second week of the school year, and already Blaine has joined a new sport. He has an all new schedule. He can’t afford to daydream through his classes now, and set the tone for the rest of the year.

Although, speaking of daydreams...

Blaine tears his eyes away from the back of the lab as quickly as he can, and he takes a seat at the lab station closest to the door, but if he’s trying to avoid distractions for this class period, he’s already off to a bad start.

The sight he saw at the far back right lab station remains burned into Blaine’s brain.

He’s seen few guys as hot as the one sitting at that station, even in magazines or on television, much less in real life. Much less in real life _Ohio_. 

He’s so tall, with light brown hair all tousled like he just rolled out of bed that way... Except when _Blaine_ rolls out of bed, his hair is a chaotic, curly mess that would scare people if Blaine didn’t meticulously tame it into submission. This guy’s hair looks like someone got paid, and paid well, to make it _look_ like nothing had touched it but maybe God and kind genetics.

He’s wearing a leather jacket - a _fucking leather jacket_ \- and skinny jeans, one long leg stretched out into the aisle between lab stations at the back. He could distract Blaine with those legs alone.

But his _face_ -

Blaine has to chance it. Even if all it gets him is a dozen texts about how the hell a moon can be ‘gibbous’, and whether werewolves can wear bulletproof vests (because don’t armored vests have silver in them?) Blaine has to break ‘Blam Rule 17‘ and text Sam during class for a non-emergency. 

‘that’s it,’ he pulls out his phone and types, before the teacher has even entered the room. ‘this day is officially the worst. i quit.’

Usually, finding a hot new guy in one of his classes at the beginning of the year would be a reason for Blaine to celebrate, but this school year has started off as anything but usual. For one thing, Blaine has until four p.m. today to psyche himself up to learn to play _football_. For another, he may or may not have contracted some form of rabies this weekend, whose only early symptom is quick healing and transferable hallucinations. 

And, finally, Blaine and his ex broke up over the summer. He can no longer be trusted not to make a fool of himself in front of hot guys - especially hot guys he has no reason not to assume are one hundred percent straight. (Not that Blaine’s ever lacked in the making-a-fool-of-himself-in-front-of-hot-guys arena, _particularly_ the straight ones.) 

These are all very good reasons for Blaine to not exactly celebrate being met with the actual physical embodiment of sex.

But they’re also _especially_ good reasons for Blaine’s heart to double trip in his chest when a smooth voice suddenly says, from just over his shoulder, “Hey, don’t give up on me just yet, Killer. The day’s only just begun.”

Either way, one moment Blaine is sitting alone in his seat, lamenting the further decline of his Monday, and in the next the hot guy Blaine almost hurt himself looking at _is sitting right beside him_.

He gracefully swoops onto the stool to Blaine’s right - there’s no other word Blaine can think of to describe it. And then he aims _that face_ at Blaine and he _smiles_.

Well. He smirks, really. Or he smiles, but like he’s thinking something really, _really_ naughty when he does.

Blaine feels hot all over. Not only can he hear his own heartbeat in his ears, for a second he could swear he hears everybody else‘s in the room as well. “What?” Blaine says, oh so cleverly.

His hot guy doesn’t blink. (-those green eyes. He has _green_ eyes. Blaine feels like his entire brain should abort, but he doesn’t really know what that would mean except for going completely off-line, and he seems to be halfway there already.)

“I couldn’t help but glance at your screen,” the hot guy says, nodding to Blaine’s phone. He doesn’t say he’s sorry for intruding on Blaine’s privacy like that - and he looks anything but apologetic. “Come on,” he says, stretching out as obscenely on the stool he’s chosen as he had in the back of the room, “it’s only second period. The day can’t actually be that bad already, can it?” 

Blaine can only scramble for something plausible to say besides, 'Your face has ruined it. It’s a ruiner.’

“You obviously haven’t met Coach Sylvester,” he says.

The other boy’s face changes with recognition. “The choir instructor?” he asks. “No. I’ve got her sixth period.”

Because of course he does. He’s gorgeous, confident... _and_ he can sing. Or at least thinks that he can.

Blaine doesn’t even let himself process that. It would be too much.

“She’s also the cheer coach,” Blaine says, “ _and_ she’s, like, co-opting players for the football team or something, because we haven’t made it to play-offs in... ever. So she’s basically in control of at least one third of my life now.”

Blaine is rambling. Nervously rambling. But he’s not being totally facetious - Sue _does_ basically own his life now, at least the parts of it that don’t involve school. Which, now that Blaine doesn’t have Kurt, is honestly more like two and a half thirds. 

“Wait... you’re on the cheer squad... _and_ the football team?” the new guy says skeptically. His face does something adorable as he laughs. “How does that work?”

Blaine is still so put out by Sue’s mechanizations, he’s not even feigning casual despair when he sighs deeply and sinks a little into his seat.

“Come four p.m. today, I guess we’ll find out.”

The boy grins at him. “I’m Sebastian, by the way. Sebastian Smythe.”

“Blaine Anderson.” And Blaine goes exactly two more seconds before saying something exceptionally stupid. “It’s nice to meet you,” he says.

Because that’s how teenaged boys speak. Oh, god.

At least Sebastian seems amused. “It’s nice to meet you too, Killer.”

Blaine’s almost afraid to ask, in case all of this - the smiles, the casual conversation, and the laughter - have all been some sort of set-up. Blaine hardly cares, these days, what any bully might say or try to do to him. He’s learned to hold his head up high, and to take what comes from that _as_ it comes.

It’s easier to do that these days, now that Blaine’s not a scared little freshman, afraid to even tell his closest loved ones that he likes boys more than girls. He’s the president of McKinley’s Gay-Straight Alliance, as well as president of the junior class, captain of the cheer squad, and currently inactive founder of the McKinley High School Fight Club.

But if there’s one thing Blaine knows _hasn’t_ changed in his life, it’s that he’s always going to meet people who take one look at his bowties, at the boys he’s dated, and see a target superimposed over those things.

“Killer?” Blaine asks, trying not to form expectations about what Sebastian’s giving him an instant nickname might mean.

Had Sebastian’s smile seemed naughty, a moment before? 

Blaine can’t honestly remember, because even if it had- This? _This_ smile that Sebastian’s giving him right now...

This is a smile full of mischief.

“You know... like ‘ladykiller’,” Sebastian says, looking Blaine straight in the eyes. “Except without the ‘lady’... Because I, for one, Blaine, can promise you... it’s not just the ladies that find this whole bashful schoolboy thing you've got going on _super_ hot.”

Okay, so not a set-up. 

At least not the kind that Blaine had worried about for half a second.

Now he just has to worry about picking his own jaw back up off the floor before Blaine accidentally swallows his tongue. 

Sebastian chuckles, just as their AP Bio instructor finally starts trying to quiet the room and take attendance.

“What, was that too much?” he asks, probably watching Blaine turn two shades darker of the red he’s undoubtedly been for most of their conversation. He’s still not saying sorry for anything.

(Not that Blaine actually wants him to. Does he?)

“It’s... a lot,” Blaine is too stunned not to admit, though he has to laugh a little too as he does, if a lot less sure of himself than Sebastian sounds (and maybe somewhat breathlessly).

“A lot doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” Sebastian says, leaning in close to say it, with their instructor systematically shushing the louder groups of students throughout the room. 

The scent of him _hits_ Blaine like Blaine’s never experienced before. He’s not wearing a cologne - at least, not any cologne that Blaine is familiar with. But still, something about what he does smell like - clean skin; soap and laundered cotton... Maybe an earthy smell like fresh soil after a soft rain-

Blaine literally feels his mouth _watering_.

It’s weird. 

And - to quote Sebastian - _super_ hot.

Blaine has a feeling his life hasn’t gotten any less complicated for having met Sebastian Smythe.

But maybe it has gotten just a little bit better.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

Blaine doesn’t have any other classes with Sebastian before lunch - which, despite Blaine’s turn-around decision on the subject, is actually a very good thing. He can barely remember a _word_ that was spoken in today’s AP Bio class - by anyone but the green-eyed hottie sitting directly next to him. He remembers sharing his class schedule with Sebastian, looking over Sebastian’s and giving him a few helpful hints about life at McKinley High - which teachers who’ll care if you sit at the front of the room or not, which teachers to _absolutely_ never let catch you talking or sleeping in their class; which restrooms are a little less substandard than all the others, and the fastest route to the gym.

When the bell rang to break for third period, Sebastian smiled again at Blaine and thanked him for the tips, then swept back off of his stool and out of the class with a wink and a “See you around, Killer.”

Blaine doubts that any of that will be on the first AP Bio exam.

Blaine doesn’t have any morning classes with Sam at all, but he had Tina in his first period, and he has Artie in two others. Blaine’s fifth period elective is a mixture of sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and among them are several of the kids in Blaine’s choir - a handful of sophomores the older kids in the club call “the new Finchel and friends” behind their backs. 

It’s not a bad name, or at least Blaine doesn’t know of anyone who considers it to be. Finn, Rachel, Kurt, Quinn, Puck, and Mercedes were like show choir royalty when Blaine joined the club for sophomore year. They were all seniors then and have gone their mostly separate ways now - Mercedes to Los Angeles to pursue a recording contract; Puck to the military, and Quinn to Yale to study law. Rachel, maybe Kurt’s best friend, is studying theater at NYADA with Kurt, and they share a studio apartment in Bushwick. Finn is still here in Beacon Hills, helping his and Kurt’s dad - technically Finn’s step-dad - run Hummel & Son’s Automotive Supply and Repair. Finn and Rachel broke up about the same time that Kurt dumped- About the same time that Kurt and Blaine broke up... though even Kurt claims not to know their full story as to why. When they were in high school, though, “Finchel” was _the_ McKinley counterculture power couple - when they weren’t un-coupling and re-coupling with their friends and enemies in the middle of some epic spat or another. Blaine has only known them a year, but he can already see the signs of a similar tendency towards drama between Ryder, Marley, Kitty, Jake, and Unique. 

Seeing them every day, right before lunch - when most of Blaine’s classmates, his teacher, and, okay, sometimes even Blaine himself, are at their “hangriest” - has been... encouraging for Blaine, so far this year. It’s encouraging, to him, that he can be around them and think of how things were last year - think of Kurt - and be okay. 

Blaine did his mourning for his “first love”, or whatever, over the summer. He and Sam spent a lot of time keeping Stevie and Stacie, Sam’s siblings, busy while Sam’s dad worked, and when they weren’t doing that, Sam made sure that Blaine still had plenty to do to keep his mind occupied long enough for his heart to heal before his head could start processing what had happened. They did little community service projects for the Sheriff’s office (Sam’s dad is the Sheriff), camped out in Sam’s back yard (Sam and his dad aren’t comfortable spending time in the Reserve like Blaine and his family always did when Blaine was a kid) and sang together so often, Blaine just knows they’re gonna kill the duet at Regionals this year.

Blaine did a lot of solo reflection over the summer, too. About how whirlwind his romance with Kurt had actually been; about how much of it could have been motivated on his part by what had happened freshman year. Blaine hadn’t just dated Kurt to prove that he _could_ \- to himself or to anyone. But perhaps Blaine _had_ been a little too eager to please when their relationship began... setting a tone that would eventually leave him feeling lonely and needy, and acting _clingy_ (which Kurt hated). 

And perhaps the need to prove something - to himself and to everyone - is why Blaine held on for as long as he did, as strange as it might seem to call a love affair that only lasted from one summer to the next “long”.

Sometimes Blaine looks back and it feels like he’s mourning a lifetime. Being with Kurt was just that consuming - that... intense. That _demanding_ of Blaine’s thoughts and energy that when Kurt left him, it felt like Blaine’s whole world had been ripped away.

Which is stupid.

Blaine knows it’s stupid. Blaine has _Sam_. He’s always had - and hopefully will always have - Sam. He has Sam’s family, and (at least in his heart, when he can stand the pain of acknowledging it) he has his own family - out there, somewhere, even if they won’t have anything to do with him anymore. Blaine has show choir and a dozen other things he enjoys doing at school and with his friends. He has Tina and Artie and Marley and the others, and his whole life ahead of him.

He has a better understanding now of the part he played in the way things went with Kurt - and the part Kurt played, too. Of how unhealthy it was to fall so hard so fast for someone he didn’t really even know that well when he and Kurt started dating - still doesn’t know enough about, for all that he shared with Kurt. Kurt is a very private person, and very guarded in some ways.

Not that, apparently, Blaine has learned everything there is to learn about unhealthy romances. Especially the how-not-to-fall-too-hard-too-fast part.

Sam takes one look at him outside the cafeteria, when they meet up for lunch - Brittany under his arm and the new Finchel and Friends commandeering a few tables in the distance - and points directly at Blaine’s face.

“Dude! The Look! How the hell are you wearing The Look right now? Are you kidding me?” Sam immediately launches into a reaction. “I just saw you _five hours ago_! What the hell?”

“Sam, _shhh_ ,” Blaine tries to nip that reaction in the bud. He wasn’t even thinking about Sebastian a moment ago. (Okay, maybe he was. But only to wonder if Sebastian has Lunch A or Lunch B, and if he has Lunch A, does he have anyone to sit with? And if he doesn’t, could Blaine ask him to sit with them without swallowing his own tongue? And-) But Blaine knows exactly what Sam is getting at. “Shut up about “the look”.”

“He doesn’t even deny it,” Sam says somberly, with a shake of his head, and Blaine has to laugh despite his embarrassment. “This is bad. Babe, this is bad,” Sam tells Brittany as she leans up on her tiptoes to kiss him goodbye. (Brittany has Lunch B.)

“The Look doesn’t have to be bad,” Brittany bestows some of her trademark wisdom upon them. “Unless The Look is for someone who smokes. That could be bad. Smoking is contagious. My cousin from Toledo visited last spring, and Lord Tubbington picked it up. He still hasn’t kicked the habit.”

Lord Tubbington is Brittany’s cat. She’s been accusing him of smuggling cigarettes out of neighbors’ houses for as long as she and Sam have been dating.

“I... don’t know if he smokes,” Blaine says, just going with it, as he accepts a kiss on the cheek from Brittany and gives her a quick hug. “And I’m not... _not_ denying it, Sam. I was just-”

Just... what was Blaine saying again?

As Brittany bounces away with her ponytail bobbing, throwing Sam kisses and telling Blaine she’ll see him at cheer practice, someone walks ahead of Blaine and Sam and the cafeteria doors swing open and closed.

And when that small burst of sound reaches Blaine’s ears, it’s like the reminder that the sound exists - all the noise of half the student population gathered in one place, barely supervised - makes Blaine hyper-focused in on it.

Like. _Really_ hyper-focused. He almost reaches up and grabs his ears, wincing.

Lunch is always loud, but is something happening right now that it’s that loud? Blaine can hardly hear to think. He definitely can’t hear what Sam is saying, has to look to Sam’s lips to watch him shape his words-

Blaine almost stops Sam from pushing the cafeteria doors open himself, but he’s focusing on trying to hear what Sam’s saying now, so by the time Sam even touches the door-

The insanely loud sounds of the cateteria stop. 

Well, they don’t _stop_. The cafeteria is still loud, by normal standards - with kids talking and shouting across the room at one another, dragging chairs to other tables and pushing their trays and forks around. But normal standards aren’t- Whatever Blaine had just experienced a moment before.

“-pining? What do the Brits call it? _Whinging_?” Sam says in one of his fake accents. (Sam loves doing accents and impressions. “You were just what, dude?”

For a second, Blaine can’t remember what he’s even talking about.

Maybe quick healing and transferable hallucinations aren’t the only symptoms of whatever that wolf gave Blaine Saturday when it bit him.

All day Blaine’s been experiencing strong sounds and smells, the way he did just now. The way he sorta had in second period. “Sam, I don’t know if I-” Blaine starts to say, but either he’s speaking much more quietly than he thinks he is, or Sam is just as distracted as Blaine had been.

“Hey,” Sam leans in close and says like he didn’t hear Blaine talking at all. “You wanna grab our food and go to the lab on the third instead?” he asks. “There’s something I’ve got to show you.”

The computer lab on the third floor is notoriously easy to break into and rarely monitored. All of the tech in there is outdated (but functional), so kids always sneak into there to skip class, hang out, or use the computers to look up porn (and - if some daring couples are to be believed - imitate it.)

“Sure,” Blaine says, without even thinking of why Sam might want to go there now. They’ve snuck up to the third floor a few times over the years, just to get away from everyone and emote over Sam’s mom taking off, Blaine’s family, Kurt or Mercedes, who Sam dated for a while (unsuccessfully). 

It wasn’t on the third floor, but Sam and Blaine _did_ one time look up porn together. It was in the eighth grade, and it was really mild gay porn, because Sam had gotten it into his head that maybe he could be gay deep down, too. Then Blaine could stop angsting over being the only gay guy they knew and they could come out together.

(The porn only emphasized for them both that, no, Sam is _not_ ‘gay deep down’ - and that Blaine really, really is. It also got them caught by Sam’s mom looking at _porn_ , nevermind what kind, which was so traumatic that it put Blaine off of broaching any conversation about sex or sexuality with an adult for at least another year.)

Sam’s been absolutely quiet since they grabbed their food, and Blaine jokes once they’re in the third floor lab, having eaten the chips and fruit they took with them on the way, just to break the strange mood that’s slipped over him.

“You didn’t bring me up here to try gay porn again, did you?” he asks. “Because we can go to your house for that.” Sam never fails to lose it at the very mention of bringing porn into his house again. If Blaine was tramautized by the compassionate and concerned “talk” Sam’s mother gave them after The Incident... Sam was truly scarred. 

This time he just says, “Dude, it’s your home, too,” like he’s only half paying attention. Then he chooses a computer in the far back corner of the lab, on the opposite side of the room as the bookshelves.

Blaine follows him, eying the bookshelves warily. Did he just hear-

But he waits a second, and if there’s anyone else in the lab with them, it isn’t someone who’s going to care that they’re here too. If someone was currently using the lab for more than a hideout or a nap, Blaine would be hearing a lot more just now than the scuff of a shoe that he _thought_ he’d heard a moment ago.

When Blaine reaches the computer Sam’s perched himself in front of, he’s already logged on and pulling up the internet browser.

And of course the word he types in is-

“Sam-”

“Just take a look at this, B,” he says. “I promise, it’s not as crazy as you think.”

The fact that Sam is acknowledging that his ‘werewolf’ hypothesis seems crazy is progress, but Blaine is still reluctant to encourage it by reading whatever Sam thinks he’s-

Sam has clicked on a couple of links, and the last click he made is still loading when Blaine opens his mouth to say- Something that he forgets almost immediately.

When the post Sam clicked on comes up, photo and all, Blaine’s mouth snaps shut.

That- That photo...

Is of the wolf.

 _Blaine’s_ wolf. Well. The wolf that bit him - that could have _killed_ him.

“Is this the wolf you saw?” Sam asks.

“Sam, _how did you find this_?” Blaine asks instead of answering, nearly breathless with whatever’s pumping through his veins right now - phantom adrenaline, from the trauma he experienced Saturday morning? Dread, looking at that muzzle - calm in the picture, but quivering with violence in Blaine’s memory, lips curled back and fangs bared... 

And something else. Something-

“Rory,” Sam says over the rush of blood in Blaine’s ears. “I didn’t think he even got what I was asking him for, but he pulled out his laptop, fired it up, and found this.” At the top of the page that Sam’s pulled up - the chat room for one of those free blogs anyone can open up - the words _Wolves in Westerville_ scroll across the screen in a thick font, inset with an image that looks like the woods in the Reserve in the moonlight.

The post at the top of the chat was posted last Thursday, and the text of it reads:

‘So quiet on here! But look what I saw tonight!! Our werewolves are back, baby!! Check it out!’

The poster is listed as ‘Anonymous’, and the photo that’s stopped Blaine short was obviously taken from an open car window while driving - there’s some heavy motion blur at the edges of the image. The wolf itself if half hidden in the darkness of the trees around it, so that only someone who knows how large it actually is could imagine how much of that dark space the wolf itself takes up. 

But it’s most certainly the wolf Blaine saw Saturday. Blurred and dark or not, Blaine will never forget the look of it. Of it’s red eyes. 

“You asked Rory?” Blaine asks numbly, brain not quite processing everything at once. Not quite ready for what this means.

“I mean, who else, right?” Sam says. “Little dude’s super smart and super weird. And if he tells anyone... Who’s gonna understand him, much less believe him, you know?” Rory is from Ireland. Only Sam and Sugar seem somewhat able to make out part of whatever Rory says, in his thick Gaelic accent. 

“And look at what else,” Sam continues, opening another tab on his browser.

When the photo of the wolf disappears, so does whatever that seems to be holding Blaine up, while he reels from the fact that _Sam’s crazy werewolf hypothesis_ seems to be real.

He falls into the nearest seat available, the one Sam pulled out for him - and even manages to spill out of that, half onto Sam’s lap.

Sam just shifts him over so he’s not in danger of falling again, reaching around him to type something into the search engine he’s pulled up next.

Specifically, Sam types: ‘werewolves in beacon county.’ There are thousands of results. Not about werewolves in general, or even ‘wolves’ wolves - not just about beacon county. Specific results that contain all three words - ‘werewolves’ and ‘beacon county’ - in their description.

“Lots of people are talking about it,” Sam says. 

“When did this start?” Blaine asks, distractedly. There are results on the search page from _years_ ago. He reaches over and clicks on one with the mouse in Sam’s hand just at random, and scrolls quietly down the page that comes up when he does. If it was posted seriously, people in Beacon County have been talking about werewolves being real since as far back as the nineties.

“The sightings of _that_ wolf?” Sam says, misunderstanding Blaine’s question, but sharing information Blaine needed to know all the same. “People have been talking about it for months. There are at least a dozen pictures.”

It’s so much. It’s _too_ much.

For some reason, Sebastian Smythe’s words from just this morning come back to Blaine - ‘A lot doesn’t have to be a bad thing.’ But this...

And was second period really just this morning? 

Blaine’s brain really just wants to retreat into the safe, satisfactory, _rational_ shell he blindly built this weekend around all of the things about Saturday that can’t be explained rationally. The quick-healing bite. How Blaine got home and doesn’t remember it. All that blood. 

And today- The sounds... the smells- 

“Sam, what do I?” 

“We’ll keep looking,” Sam says, gesturing to his... research. On _werewolves_.

Could werewolves really be-

Could _Blaine_ really be a-

Blaine doesn’t even realize he’s stood up until Sam stands too, concern all over his handsome face. But no disgust. No fear. 

“ _We’ll_ keep looking,” Sam repeats, eyes on Blaine’s and more serious than Blaine has ever seen them. “Understand? Whatever this is- Whatever’s going on, we’ll- We’ll handle it. We can handle it, Blaine. Alright? You and me. The way we handled Kurt, remember? It’ll be just like that, only... You know. Furrier.”

Blaine has no idea how Sam can say any of that so calmly - how he can promise any of that if Blaine really was bitten by a _monster_ , might _become_ a monster. Blaine himself is about ready to shake out of his skin. He feels like he can’t catch his breath - like that wolf is _here_ , inside of him, with its jaw clamped tight around his heart, and he just can’t calm it down-

The way Sam couldn’t quite calm down Saturday, until Blaine had assured him, again and again... and again, that he was alright. The way Sam couldn’t catch his breath. 

This weekend, while Blaine’s been suppressing everything that happened, Sam’s already been dealing with it - alone. He must have come to his werewolf decision well before he even shared it with Blaine. 

“Sam...” Blaine tries to express his gratitude and his apology at the thought, but all he manages to get out without choking up is Sam’s name. 

Then Sam sweeps him up in one of his massive hugs. “We can, B,” he says again. “I promise.” There’s no way Sam can promise anything about a thing like this - a few days ago, a thing like this would have seemed impossible.

But wrapped up in Sam’s arms, Blaine can let himself believe it long enough to get himself under control. To stop hearing his own heartbeat, his own breath, tripled and echoing in his ears. To stop shaking at last. By the time the bell rings for the end of lunch, Blaine can even pull back from the security of Sam’s embrace and give his best friend - his brother - a watery smile.

“You don’t think Sue will let me off the hook for football if I tell her I can’t make it to practice because of werewolves, do you?” Blaine goes so far as to joke. 

That’s what he and Sam do to handle the really hard stuff - they joke and they sing, and they don’t have time to sing before the bell for sixth period rings again. About ninety five percent of Blaine’s recovery from his breakup with Kurt he owes to Sam’s sense of humor and lighthearted Kurt impressions.

“Are you kidding?” Sam says, “I think she’d make you bring the wolf to practice.” 

Blaine was _trying_ to be ridiculous, but Sam is exactly right - Sue probably would.

Neither of them think to turn off the computer they’ve just used before heading downstairs for choir - there’s at least one other monitor on in the lab, logged onto the school’s homescreen, so it’s not like they’re the only ones. The tardy bell is seconds away from ringing, and if there’s one thing Blaine doesn’t need to add to the stresses of this day it’s dealing with a vengeful Sue Sylvester after he’s walked into her class late.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

In a perfect world, Blaine could go home after lunch and after choir, and quietly finish freaking out about the lycanthropy he may or may not have contracted by walking to school on Saturday.

But it’s not a perfect world. Sam’s father has a deal with Principal Figgins that if the principal will call him anytime Sam is mysteriously absent from a class when he hasn’t been signed out or absent all day, then Sheriff Evans won’t ticket Figgins more than once a week for driving the ancient Pinto he drives to and from work each day. (That thing can’t have passed a state inspection in at least half a decade.)

And of course Blaine isn’t going to skip without Sam. 

So instead, they stay, and Blaine gives in to the temptation he’s been fighting all morning to let his mind wander - albeit, this time, to one specific topic instead of many.

Well. To two. Blaine does spare some thought, briefly, to the absence of Sebastian for choir sixth period. He’d shown Blaine his schedule - he was supposed to be in that class. Had _he_ skipped after lunch, on his first day? Blaine hadn’t dared ask what his friends thought. Sam had let Blaine off easy about The Look Sam saw at lunch, and Blaine doesn’t want to remind him until after they’ve finished discussing... more serious issues. Blaine felt silly even being so curious about some random hot guy who, for all Blaine knows, could be a real asshole if spoken to for longer than one conversation. (As nice as he’d seemed this morning...) 

Especially when all of Blaine’s friends were talking about the lack of a certain other expected new addition to their class. The former Dalton Academy student Tina mentioned didn’t show sixth period either. It seems as though they won’t be getting a former Dalton Warbler to take with them to Sectionals, after all.

“I’m t-t-te- telling you,” Tina insisted, once Sue had finished scolding and threatening them for the day - as usual - and let them group up to brainstorm set pieces. “He sh-should be here.”

“Yeah, here at McKinley,” Artie reasoned. “That’s all we heard, Tina. We didn’t hear anyone say he was going to join the New Directions.”

“Well, of course he will... Right?” Marley argued on Tina’s behalf. “I mean, he was a _Warbler_. Weren’t those guys, like, super dedicated? He wouldn’t just _not_ join... And miss out on show choir altogether?”

“Maybe he’s got better things to do now that his friends are all dead than hang out with you losers,” Kitty piped in from where she sat, with them but apart, with her feet kicked up in Jake’s lap for a foot rub as she filed her nails.

Jake emphatically rolled his eyes as soon as Kitty was looking back down at her nails, and Marley seemed to need the way she bit her bottom lip to stop from laughing out loud.

(Last week, Blaine would swear Marley and Jake were a thing. Today Marley and Ryder couldn’t seem to stop staring at one another.)

“You’re _one_ of us losers, Kitty,” Unique told her with a lot less fondness than either Marley or Jake seem to have for their almost Sue-ishly outspoken friend.

Kitty pointed her nail file at her. “ _That_ remains to be seen,” she said. “If we don’t have a strong set list to take to Sectionals by September, I’m bailing.” She’d said something similar, though, all last year, so no one paid that comment too much attention. 

So Blaine’s mind wanders _for a bit_ to Sebastian, but most of his seventh and eighth period class is spent thinking about a much more disturbing acquaintance he’s made recently.

Now that the shock of having seen that wolf again - and of having proof that he saw it, that he didn’t imagine it or dream it up; that he didn’t exaggerate its size or the color of its eyes in his memory- 

Now that all that’s passed, Blaine realizes that just because other people have seen that wolf... as freakishly large and intimidating as it is... and just because other people have called it a werewolf- That doesn’t mean it actually _is_ one. 

Jumping to the conclusion that anything Rory helped Sam find online proves the werewolf theory was a panic response. The healing bite, the blood, the things Blaine _thought_ he heard and smelled and-

Okay. Those things are still open to explanation. But the wolf... a dozen people saying a crazy thing doesn’t make the crazy thing true. (Or, in the case of those search results, 1,176 people saying a crazy thing...)

At least, that’s the perspective Blaine comes to over the time he spends in his last two classes of the day, _not_ paying any attention to Psychics or Government. 

And it stays with him right up until it’s time for football practice.

Where his new perspective gets thrown by a whole extra helping of crazy.

“This can’t be legal,” Blaine tries protesting as he’s strapped in place between Jake and a kicker named Oswald. Ryder is on the other side of Oswald; besides them, Blaine doesn’t know anyone else taking the first turn on the tackle sleds.

Yes, _on_ the tackle sleds.

As in strapped to the _front_ of them.

Oswald sounds like he’s quietly praying in Spanish.

“Coach, is this legal?” Jake yells across the yard lines between them and Coach Beiste, who’s standing by the water coolers with a concerned look on her face.

“Well, son... It’s not _not_ legal,” is her less than encouraging response. “Though, to be honest... I’m fairly sure that’s because no one’s ever felt the need to tell folks that they shouldn’t do this sort of thing.”

“Can’t blame us for your legislative government’s gross negligence,” Coach Sue says, returning from giving the cheer squad practicing on the other side of the field their marching orders. Blaine’s sure they were just: ‘Burpees until you puke, you babies. Or until I get back from making Tweedle Dumb and Tweedles Dumber, Two through Twenty-Five, over there wish they’d never put on a jockstrap. Whichever comes first.’

Blaine never thought he’d see the day when he _missed_ Sue’s crazy cheer practice hijinks.

Sue’s crazy football practice hijinks seem even more certain to end in bodily harm.

“In the meantime,” Sue is saying, “Their short-sidedness is going to work to our advantage. We’re gonna toughen up you turf-biters if we’ve gotta bury each and every tackle dummy in this complex, with you strapped to them, to do it! Any last minute questions?”

About a dozen hands go up.

“Coach, I just don’t see why we have to be strapped to the sleds to do this,” Ryder says without waiting to be chosen. “I mean, couldn’t we just practice tackling each other without-”

Simultaneously, the boy strapped to the farthest sled on Blaine’s left says, “Uh, Coach Sylvester, I- I’m not even on the team. The office just sent me to tell you that you have a call on line 1. I don’t think the pads you gave me even fit ri-”

“Okay, good talk!” Sue shouts without answering any question at all. She gives the silver whistle around her neck one long blow, and waves at the first line of players up to tackle.

None of them look particularly happy about it. (Although, if anyone, the kid preparing to tackle Blaine first looks least happy. He keeps nervously checking over his shoulder to where Sam is fifth in line and dead-eying everyone in front of him.)

But as soon as Sue clears the area, and blows her whistle again, tackle they do.

No one wants to see what Sue might do to them if they disobey orders. _This_ was what she came up with after praising them all for doing their stretching exercises without being told. (Although, now that he thinks about it, Blaine’s pretty sure she was being facetious.)

Blaine has never been tackled before. 

Theoretically, he doesn’t _object_ to the concept. He likes football. He likes watching it, and not just from the sidelines in his cheer uniform. He’s been a diehard Eagles fan since he was little. (His brother, Cooper, bought him his first penant, and Blaine still has it, boxed up in his closet back at Sam’s house). Blaine even likes throwing a football around. He and Sam play flag football with some of their friends in the GSA once a month.

In practice, the only kind of tackling Blaine wants to do with a boy in tight pants doesn’t involve mouthguards or football helmets, or the potential for a head injury.

“Oh my god...” he can’t help but let slip past his lips.

Oswald is praying louder.

“Remember, Blaine,” Jake is telling Blaine at the same time. “Square your shoulders, loosen your knees. Drop your heels.”

“ _Pleasedon’tletSamkillme..._ ” the kid about to tackle Blain shouts quickly as he races towards Blaine’s sled.

Blaine shrieks.

And then the equivalent force, Blaine imagines, of having a wall fall down on him, hits with an apology and a great groan from the tracks connecting each sled and helping keep each sled upright.

Or. Mostly upright. The kid who’d raised his hand at the same time as Ryder folds like a paper airplane, and another boy’s sled rocks back then forward again like it’s on a spring.

Blaine’s sled stays up, although Blaine isn’t sure he’d be claiming the same if he wasn’t strapped to it.

Blaine’s helmet and pads do their job, at least. The blow doesn’t hurt exactly, which- Is actually very surprising. Blaine can hear most of the other boys groaning as the tilted sleds are righted and the tackle lines get into position for the next boys in rotation. At most, Blaine feels winded, and there’s a tingle in his teeth that makes him think he was maybe biting down on his mouthgaurd wrong when the tackle connected. 

“Next!” Sue yells, then blows her whistle, while Blaine is still wondering how you can bite a mouthgaurd _wrong_... and how the hell he’s supposed to figure out how to bite it right.

The second blow makes three of the boys curse.

“Ow! Ow! Fuck! Square your fucking shoulders, Tilmore!” Jake barks at the bulky kid who just plowed into him.

“Sorry, homie!”

By the third blow, Blaine thinks he’s hearing an oddly low-pitched ringing in his ears. This continuous hum is quietly starting to drown out the sounds of the boys around him complaining or apologizing and Sue in the distance, yelling at a cheerleader. (‘It was a figure of _speech_ , Allison! Do you have _any_ idea how hard it is to clean vomit off of artifical turf? Do you?! Well, you’re about to find out.’)

He doesn’t realize that the hum is coming from outside of his head until he notices Jake and Oswald looking around themselves from the corner of his eye.

Finally, Jakes says, “Anderson... are you _growling_?”

Blaine looks at him in surprise. The humming stops. “What?” The word sounds muffled through Blaine’s mouthguard. He _must_ have bitten it wrong, because he can no longer shift it away from his teeth with his tongue when he wants to speak. That seems like the kind of thing someone should have warned him about. 

“Hey, watch ou-”

This time, when Blaine gets tackled, he has forgotten to expect it, and-

He honestly has no idea what happens in the moment. It happens that smoothly and that naturally.

With Blaine unprepared, the body that collides with his has the force to nearly bend the padded column Blaine is strapped to back flat - and Blaine instinctively bucks against the straps pulling him to the sled, the human form pressing him down on it. Blaine thinks ‘agression, fear, regret’, as the stink of sweaty teenaged athlete assaults him so potently that Blaine almost gags.

The straps break. Like the little plastic loops that some stores use to hold a price tag on an item, they just pop like someone’s given them all a sharp tug, and Blaine feels the teammate on top of him - # 43, Blaine has English III with him - lift smoothly off of him.

No.

He doesn’t lift. Blaine is pushing him. _Propelling_ him, really, and Blaine is lifting too.

The tracks all of the tackle sleds are attached to shudder and groan, and Blaine is suddenly standing on his feet several steps in front of it and his toppled sled with its broken straps. # 43 flails as he lands on his back, a full foot away. The remaining two boys in Blaine’s tackle line have to jump backwards so he doesn’t hit them when he falls.

Everyone is absolutely silent.

And each and every one of them jump as if a gun’s gone off when Sue suddenly shrieks, “You see! _That’s_ what I’m talking about! Good _job_ , Anderson! Becky! Get that man some more straps.”

Blaine thinks he’s going to pass out. He’s going to hyperventilate.

He catches Sam out of the corner of his eye, trying to catch his attention, and Sam is mouthing something at him over and over.

‘Breathe, dude... Just breathe, B.’

Blaine does.

After a minute, it even feels like the hum - that seems to have returned and moved into the inside of Blaine’s chest - has almost faded away, but it hasn’t left. It doesn’t leave for the rest of the practice.

And Blaine’s mouthgaurd is really starting to bother Blaine’s gums. He tugs off his helmet to get to it, while some of the other boys on the team break from their lines to help reposition the tackle sleds and their tracks. 

Blaine walks off the field a short ways so he can turn his back to them. His mouthgaurd doesn’t actually feel like he _can_ get to it - like Blaine can get it out. He can’t jiggle it at all with his tongue now. That _can’t_ be normal. And he doesn’t want anyone to see him struggle with it.

Struggle Blaine does. He has to open his mouth wide to fit his fingers inside and get a good grip on his obviously mangled mouthgaurd and try to tug it off of his teeth. He’s apparently bitten it to it hard enough for his teeth to get _stuck_? (What kind of cheap equipment has Sue been buying for these boys? Blaine makes a mental note to himself to look into which vendor Sue uses for the mouthgaurds and whether or not the plastic they use is toxic.) 

With a bit of a stronger tug, the mouthgaurd finally comes out of Blaine’s mouth... in pieces.

In the center of each break there are small, almost perfectly circular holes straight through the plastic, like someone punched through the mouthgaurd repeatedly with an icepick. 

Blaine feels like passing out again.

“Jeez, Anderson, who knew you could be such a beast,” Becky suddenly says, from directly behind Blaine, in her careful speech.

Blaine whips around, curling the remains of his mouthgaurd up tight in his fists.

“What?” he asks. The only word he’d heard Becky say clearly was the word ‘beast’.

“Come on, big boy. Coach wants you strapped back to the sled,” Becky tells him, not bothering to repeat herself. She’s holding up a new set of straps.

Blaine looks around them. Nobody is looking at him strangely. No one’s looking at him at all, except as if wondering when he’s going to get back into position so they can finish this.

“Uh... yeah. Yeah, okay.” Then Blaine looks down at the helmet he’d dropped onto the turf as he fought with his mouthgaurd. “I’m- I’m gonna need a new mouthgaurd, too.”

“Yeah, you are,” Becky says in a disturbingly... suggestive tone of voice. Blaine blinks. “Run back to the lockerroom and get one. Coach keeps them in the ball closet. I’ll tell her to put Parker in your place. Coach listens to me.”

“Uh, right. Thanks.”

With a swish of her ponytail, Becky turns to do just that, and Blaine grabs for his helmet carefully so he doesn’t drop the bits of broken plastic in his hands.

“If I don’t see _each_ and every one of you breaking straps today, we’re going to be doing this all week, ladies!” Sue is shouting at everyone.

As one, the team - minus Blaine - groans.

Blaine can’t get off the field fast enough.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

When Blaine dreams that night he’s back in the woods.

He’s falling onto damp soil and crabwalking backwards, desperate, trying to run from the massive beast ruffling its fur and baring its fangs at him, except Blaine can’t even rise to his shaky knees, much less get back on his legs...

The wolf hunches down on its hindquarters, the thick muscle in its flanks tensed like it could launch itself at Blaine at any moment-

The foggy woods are just the same as they were Saturday, a dark canopy overhead and fresh earth underneath. The same wispy moonlight illuminates everything... The wolf is there inside it, watching, fangs exposed - but it doesn’t look like it’s preparing to pounce this time. It isn’t growling or snarling; no drool drips from its terrifying teeth.

The fangs aren’t a sign of aggression. They’re a display of power, somehow Blaine understands that. He can see it in the wolf’s glowing green eyes.

And the wolf is waiting for Blaine to come to him.

Blaine wakes with a start.

And... that’s when things get weird.

Because he doesn’t wake up in his bed.

“You went _back_ to the woods!” Sam just about busts Blaine’s eardrum when Blaine makes it back to the house and wakes him up.

Or does he? Can Blaine bust an eardrum now? Is he impervious to that kind of thing? Or does his freaky werewolf resilience only apply to, like, his critical systems - skeletal, circulatory...

“ _Hey_. Hey, dude, no dozing off on me,” Sam chides, all but pouting in the center of his bed, blonde hair pointing in half a dozen different directions. “Why the _hell_ did you go back to the woods? Are you _trying_ to get yourself eaten by a werewolf?”

“I didn’t choose to go back to the woods, Sam,” Blaine says, turning over onto his back on the pillow he stole out from under Sam so he doesn’t fall back asleep as easily. “That’s what I’m telling you. I must have... I don’t know. Sleepwalked.”

“Do you sleepwalk?” Sam asks in a sleep-slurred voice. “Is that even a thing you do?”

“I guess werewolf me does.”

“Dude.”

After football practice yesterday, Blaine and Sam did all the research they could possibly pack into one day. Which was... A lot. Sam’s mom has Stevie and Stacie for the first couple of months of school, since Sam’s dad had them for the summer, and the Sheriff worked late again last night. So other than a quick call to Sam’s siblings, just to check in with them, and a stop by the sheriff’s office to make sure Sam’s dad ate something with actual nutritional value for dinner, they didn’t have anything to do _but_ research.

Sam pieced together Blaine’s shattered mouthgaurd like a 3D puzzle. He even used a piece of foam board and some pins out of the junk drawer, left over from an old science project, to keep it together. The holes in the mouthgaurd definitely looked like they came from something long and pointed.

Like a fang?

And Blaine pulled up ‘ _Wolves in Westerville_ ’, this time reading as far back as he could get before Sam finished with his project and insisted they look up a few more general facts about werewolves.

If most of what people have been saying on that blog about werewolves being in Beacon County - especially Beacon Hills’s northernmost neighbor, Westerville - is true (and why wouldn’t it be, if Blaine actually is one?) then werewolves have _definitely_ been around Ohio since at least the nineties. Things have been quiet, according to the posts on the blog (or lack thereof) for the last year, but before that there had almost been a post a week about the giant wolves spotted around that side of the Reserve. Reports of oddly repetitive howling - like the wolves were talking to one another... Even someone from two summers ago who claimed to have seen glowing red eyes outside a _bar_ well into the city. 

The further back Blaine dug, the more he found. Up until fifteen years ago, people were claiming to see whole packs of giant wolves running together through the woods. Massive, wolf- _like_ beings that walked around on almost human legs and hooved feet were reported all over the county - and those reports sometimes referenced past accounts from as far back as the seventies.

Fifteen years ago all the major sightings just stopped, and only reports of single wolf sightings or of wolf-like sounds remained... until last year, when those stopped too.

As for the general facts Blaine and Sam looked up, they turned out to be no less mysterious if even more numerous than the entries on the Westerville blog. 

The main problem with those is deciding what’s real and what’s not, who’s got what right. Some of the sources Blaine and Sam found said that silver as a danger to werewolves is just an old myth - some claim that it can burn the skin off of a werewolf on contact. Sam and Blaine tried to test it with some of the things around Sam’s house that might be all silver, but they can’t be sure that any of it is _real_ silver, and nothing Blaine’s touched so far has hurt him. That could be because the silver in Sam’s house isn’t the right kind of silver - or it could be because the websites naysaying the silver theory are right. _Or_ it could be because Blaine hasn’t... turned (?) enough to be affected either way.

Same goes for the list of plants poisonous to werewolves that Blaine found. Half the names of the plants sound made-up (Wolf’s Bane? Really?) but Sam swears he’s seen a few of them out in the Preserve, so they’ve planned to take a (careful) walk out there - within running distance of the school - and see if they can find some to test _that_ out.

All of the websites Blaine and Sam have seen so far agree on just a few things:

When a werewolf bites a person, that person turns into a werewolf. They turn into a werewolf in a lot of little ways just whenever (most websites mention the hightened senses Blaine has experienced, and the inhuman strength; some even talk about crazy things like mindcontrol and being able to heal someone through touch) but the full moon is when the biggest change, the shapeshifting, happens.

New werewolves are the most dangerous werewolves. Especially, some sources say, if they don’t have any other werewolves to stick close to. During full moons, in fact, new werewolves are so dangerous that other wolves will try and kill them if they catch them out alone and think that they don’t belong to any sort of a pack.

If a new werewolf kills the werewolf who turned them, he or she takes that werewolf’s power as their own. They become even stronger and faster than they did when they turned into a werewolf... and they can control how and what they heal when they’re injured.

Some people even say that with the amount of power a new werewolf gets from killing his or her ‘alpha’... he or she can channel their will into healing themselves of their lycanthropy.

If those people are right, Blaine can heal his lycanthropy.

He can turn himself back into a human.

If he can find and _kill_ a werewolf - _the_ werewolf that did this to him.

“ _Hey_ ,” Sam says again, shaking Blaine awake just when Blaine realizes he’s dozed off again. He could see dark trees behind his eyelids - gray fur...

“What?” Blaine wakes with a start.

“It _was_ just sleepwalking, right?” Sam asks, staring at Blaine’s face. Blaine almost felt like reaching up and making sure he hadn’t grown fur himself “You didn’t go out there trying to find-”

“ _No_ ,” Blaine is quick to reassure him. 

There’s no way Blaine would go _looking_ to face that monster again, all alone. Just the thought of it gives Blaine shivers. What if the werewolf bit him on the neck this time, rather than the arm? What if it forgot it had bitten him the first time and it killed him trying to change him again?

One of the websites Blaine and Sam found last night speculates that werewolves purposefully bite people for two reasons. To build a pack... or to put some of its power into someone else, like for safe-keeping. So that other wolves won’t know how powerful it is until it starts going around killing all the new wolves it’s made, drawing all that power back to itself.

“No, Sam. I’m no werewolf hunter.” Geez, it sounds crazy to say that. Blaine doesn’t care how many mouthgaurds he bites through or how many young men he tosses across a yardline. He doesn’t think it will ever stop sounding crazy to him to say _werewolf_ in reference to a real thing. “I don’t know what I’d do if I saw that wolf again.”

Die, probably. If the wolf just bit him to turn him into some kind of werewolf powerbank. A little portable charger.

What a depressing reason to have been made into a monster.

“We’ll figure it out, B,” Sam says sincerely, patting Blaine on his chest. “You just gotta promise me you won’t try anything stupid until we do, man. Not without me.”

Blaine smiles despite the heavy tone to Sam’s statement.

“No trying anything stupid without you,” he confirms.

“Damn straight. Blam only does the really stupid things together.” Sam thinks about that and then reconsiders his wording. “Wait-”

Blaine laughs. 

As long as he and Sam can do that together, maybe Blaine can wait for everything else to start making sense.

At least he hopes.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

The school day doesn’t exactly make Blaine’s vow to stay calm, and patient about learning what _exactly_ is happening to him (and what he should do about it), any easier.

First, Artie confronts him between the parking lot and the school with some really... uncomfortable questions about yesterday’s practice, which he apparently watched from the bleachers. Being basically accused of sampling _steroids_ by one of his oldest friends - even in a concerned, if sort of strangely pointed way - isn’t a great start.

Then Blaine gets caught zoning out in first period. Or... zoning in. Trying to stretch his hearing, his sight, farther than he ought to be able.

And he does. First he listens in on Kitty asking Jake _and_ Ryder to be her dates to the party she’s throwing Friday night... in their English II classroom, all the way down the hall. Then he tries hearing farther- And he accidentally gets an earful of someone’s car alarm suddenly going off in the gym parking lot. He startles visibly and shouts out loud, right in the middle of a class reading, when almost everyone else is being absolutely quiet. 

His shout startles like five other people, and then, when Mrs. Baker asks him if he’s alright, what Blaine happens to say (still deafened by that alarm, unable in his fluster to focus back _off_ of the sound) is, “Yes. Yes, I’m o-kay... I just... realized I left. I left my lights on. On my car.”

‘Oh my god.’

Blaine’s classmates apparently think he’s hilarious, but Mrs. Baker... not so much.

“Your lights- Mr. Anderson, why exactly did that warrant disrupting my entire... Are you vandalizing that desk?”

Blaine is _not_ vandalizing anything! He would never- Except when he looks down at his desktop, right along the edge where he was gripping with his right hand, there’s a deep gouge in the wood, two centimeters long, beneath his right thumb.

Beneath his right thumb... nail isn’t really the word.

Blaine can’t completely swallow the quick puff of air that gasps out of him at the sight of the long, sharp points at the end of what had been his neatly trimmed, definitely not pointed fingernails, and he curls his fists quickly to hide them.

He can only guess that his classmates are either too busy laughing at his red face, or taking advantage of Mrs. Baker’s divided attention to check their phones, to have looked down at his hands. When Blaine glances around himself, no one seems to have seen anything out of the ordinary. 

“What do you have there?” Mrs. Baker demands all the same.

“N-nothing... ma’am. Just- Just my hands,” Blaine stutters. He can feel the tips of his... _oh, god_ , his _claws,_ pricking his palms, but-

“What’s _in_ your hands, Blaine?” Mrs. Baker asks, walking over. “What did you make that mark with?”

“I- I didn’t,” Blaine lies. _Badly_. But his fingers feel different than they had a second before; his cuticles are tingling (there’s a thing Blaine never thought he’d say outside of mani-pedi days) but his knuckles don’t ache, and he can’t feel anything sharp digging into his skin any longer, so he opens up his hands before Mrs. Baker can reach for them.

They’re, of course, empty. There are tiny little scratches all over his palms now, but his hands are empty, his fingernails lightly pink with traces of his own blood but rounded and short once again.

Mrs. Baker blinks at them, obviously caught off gaurd.

“Well... you can explain to Principal Figgins how you managed to carve that mark into the desk then,” she finally decides. “ _Now_ , Blaine,” she adds when Blaine doesn’t immediately respond.

“Y-yes, ma’am,” he says, gathering his things, as his classmates continue to snicker.

“And- and see the nurse about your hands,” Mrs. Baker says just before Blaine is all the way out her door. He nods and hurries along, his face still burning.

No.

No, this day has not started off any better than Blaine’s first since-the-bite Monday.

And second period looks like it’s going to be more of the same. Blaine walks in half anticipating, half dreading Sebastian being sat, again, in the seat right next to Blaine’s. While washing his hands before going to see Principal Figgins, Blaine caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, and his hair has _never_ defied its gel this early in a day before. _Never_.

But today it is defiant. Luckily, the pernicious curls that riot if Blaine doesn’t gel the life out of them directly after his shower aren’t making a full show of themselves - at the most, they form gentle waves at the top of his head and curl lightly around his hairline. But having seen what happens when his hairgel completely fails, Blaine can’t help but consider even this small change in his normally meticulous style a kind of threat. He is _not_ ready to be seen by the almost supernaturally hot Sebastian Smythe.

Which should maybe make him feel better when he gets to AP Bio and Sebastian isn’t even in the class.

But it doesn’t.

Just after the tardy bell rings, Sebastian slides through the door, and Blaine’s heart trip-hammers at the sight of him. 

Same artfully disheveled hair, same leather jacket. Another pair of sinfully tight skinny jeans showcasing legs Blaine feels personally attacked by, and honestly, the fact that he is so devastated by the overall impact of being in Sebastian’s presence is probably the only thing that keeps Blaine from losing control again of his fangs or his claws. 

“Hey, Killer,” Sebastian says, with a sly smile steadily widening into a full grin across his handsome face.

So, his little quip from yesterday has apparently stuck as his nickname for Blaine.

He’s given Blaine a nickname. 

Blaine’s sure he’s blushing, but right now he can’t even care. He’s just concentrating on not ‘wolfing out’, or whatever he should call it. Now that Blaine’s aware that he _can_ , he’s trying his hardest not to panic about the possibility, so he’s not obsessing over it, but it’s a serious concern.

“Hey- Hey, Sebastian,” Blaine somehow manages to greet his... new friend? Lab station-mate? Sounding only maybe somewhat breathless, probably.

“Love the hair. Kinda letting loose today, huh?” Sebastian asks, dropping onto his stool. “Lucky me,” he says, and he _winks_.

Geez. How the hell did a guy like this end up in _Beacon Hills_?

Blaine’s mouth goes on a complete auto-pilot while he ponders that. “Oh, believe me,” he hears himself saying, “if these got out, it would not be lucky. Not for anyone. No one should have to see that.”

“These?” Sebastian asks, his flirty grin sort of flickering in surprise. He looks at Blaine’s hair as Blaine has, ridiculously (apparently, his hand gestures have also gone on auto-pilot) gestured towards the top of his head.

“The curls,” Blaine says, trying not to sigh, his deep disappointment in himself probably coming across as a lament. Not that he isn’t lamenting _plenty_. Blaine regrets every bit of his own social ineptness in the wake of his disaster with Kurt. Blaine used to flirt via flash-mob with boys... at least one sixth as attractive as Sebastian. Now he can hardly carry a conversation without saying something stupid. “They are a freakish force of nature. My hairgel can usually keep them contained, but I don’t know what it’s doing now.”

It’s only when Sebastian’s smile well and truly falls away, a somehow softer expression left in its place - a sort of accidentally open look, like Sebastian is too busy deciding what he’s looking at to notice what his face is doing - that Blaine realizes how little of that smile had actually been reflected in Sebastian’s pretty eyes before. 

Something about those eyes gives Blaine pause, too, now that he's noticed that - and not in the same way they gave him pause the first time he saw them. Some memory Blaine can’t quite locate tugs at the back of his brain. Or the memory of a memory? Had Blaine dreamt of _Sebastian_ last night before he’d started dreaming of the wolf?

“You think curls are a ‘freakish force of nature’?” Sebastian asks.

“I think my curls are a freakish force of nature,” Blaine agrees, because it’s obviously too late to pretend that he’s any cooler than he is. “And I’m sure you would too if you saw them.”

It’s almost unsettling, virtually watching Sebastian lift whatever curtain fell when Blaine surprised him with his ridiculous venting about his hair. His smile returns, slyer than ever - and no closer to touching his eyes - and Blaine allows himself the little pang he feels at realizing that this is just how Sebastian is, apparently. The sitting so close, the smiling like that... the intense gaze. The tease in his tone and in his words- Sebastian is just that kind of devil-may-care flirt, who enjoys riling up people who are easy to rile. He probably sat by Blaine yesterday because Blaine had made a spectacle of himself already by staring, and returned to the same seat today to see if he could get Blaine to stare - and to blush and to stammer - again. Just for fun. He didn’t seek Blaine out because he was necessarily as attracted to Blaine, at first sight, the way Blaine was instantly attracted to him.

“I don’t know,” Sebastian says smoothly, “maybe I don’t know enough about freaks of nature. But I can’t imagine any bedhead could be that bad if it comes with that head... and a bed.”

Blaine also allows himself an eyeroll, and to laugh openly when Sebastian looks surprised to have gotten one. 

_Knowing_ that Sebastian’s flirting doesn’t actually mean anything may be a bit disappointing for Blaine... but it also makes him a little more comfortable. And aware of how over the top Sebastian’s over the top flirting actually is.

“Oh my god, you are-” ‘Gorgeous and adorable,’ Blaine wants to say, ‘And too aware of it. Of _course_ you’re just messing with me.’ “You are just really out there, aren’t you?” he says instead.

Their instructor is silently taking attendance and about to start the class at any moment, and so the noise level in the room is naturally lowering itself as the class settles in.

Sebastian, too, lowers his voice, so he has to lean in closer to Blaine to say, “I just call it like I see it.”

Blaine shakes his head, although he’s smiling. 

“I mean, it’s not like you don’t know you’re hot,” Sebastian only continues. “I’m sure your boyfriend tells you so all the time.”

He says it _so_ casually, Blaine has to remind himself that Sebastian likely just _is_ that casual with his flirting. He probably isn’t seriously fishing for information.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Blaine tries to say just as easily.

“You’re kidding. Not even the blonde guy with the big lips?”

Mentioning Sam... isn’t as casual, but Sebastian does it in the same neutral tone. 

“Who, Sam? Oh, god, no. Sam and I are best friends. More like brothers, actually.” There have been times, of course, when Blaine has wondered what if... And if The Incident had gone differently, maybe- But those times have been fewer since Sam and his family invited Blaine into their home - and fewer still since Sam helped Blaine through his Kurt crisis, truly cementing his place in Blaine’s life as the best non-birth brother a guy could have. “Just- No. No, I don’t have feelings for Sam like that,” Blaine tries to laugh the suggestion off. “And... he’s straight. He’s dating Brittany Pierce. From the cheer squad? They’ve been together for over a year.”

“My bad,” Sebastian says, although he still looks oddly skeptical. “Guess I heard wrong. But that just means I was right before, doesn’t it?”

While Blaine _is_ listening to Sebastian - more like, hanging on his every word (oh, he’s got it bad, doesn’t he?) - he’s so distracted by the way Sebastian readjusts his position on his stool, so that his long legs can stretch out beneath their lab table, and by the perfect curve of his flat stomach, visible in the way he curls his body as he moves, through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. 

It takes Blaine a moment to realize that he has no idea what Sebastian meant by what he just said. 

“What?” he asks. Sebastian grins.

Because then the instructor is telling the class to get out their textbooks and where to turn in their journals, and Blaine has to wait until the end of the ironically busy hour to question Sebastian any further. 

As the bell rings and Sebastian stands to leave, Blaine says quickly, “Wait! Sebastian, what did you mean you were right before?”

Blaine is expecting for Sebastian to grin at him again, to lean in and wink after he’s gotten to his punchline.

He isn’t expecting him to lean in _quite_ so close... placing on large hand on top of Blaine’s books, sitting on the tabletop in front of him, or to bend down so that his face and Blaine’s are level as he speaks.

“Lucky me,” he says as he had when complimenting Blaine’s hair. And he lets his eyes drop to Blaine’s lips... just for a second. Then he winks and walks away. 

The scent of him lingers for a moment, and Blaine feels it in his gut, his teeth, _and_ his knuckles.

“ _Fuck_.”

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

Blaine doesn’t know how Tina found out between the last morning class he has with her and sixth period (during lunch he and Sam had a class leadership meeting but she and Artie are waiting for Blaine and Sam one hall over when they start heading for the choir room, and she’s excited to give them an update on he Dalton import situation.

She’s so excited, it takes her a moment to calm down and work with her stutter and not against it.

Blaine and Sam each wait patiently for her to say what she’s trying to say, but Artie gives her a moment and then says, “She found out the Warbler is here today for sure. Ow!”

“Artie!” Tina shrieks. “I w-wanted to t-t- to tell them!”

Her eyes are soft though when she looks at Artie, and Blaine is quietly thankful for the thousandth time that the two of them found each other in middle school, and then Sam, who found Blaine. He forgets sometimes how not to tread _too_ lightly around Tina’s speech. Artie, however, always seems to know when she just needs time to express herself, and when she needs the help she at other times feels pitied by being offered.

“I didn’t tell them the best part!” Artie claims, and it must be true because Tina lets him off the hook pretty easily.

“I h-heard Coach Sue telling K-K- She told Kitty she’s going to m-make him audition _today_ ,” Tina announces.

“So he is joining the New Directions,” Blaine says. “That’s great.” It really is, too. Blaine feels a little silly at how emo he got the day before at just the thought of coming into contact with a former Dalton student, now after the fire. Dealing with a _species change_ and the knowledge that an actual werewolf might be out there, somewhere, wanting to kill him has really put things into perspective.

“Yeah, but Sue’s making him audition on his first day?” Sam says. “That’s harsh, man.”

“Sue told Kitty that’s what he gets for skipping out after lunch on his first day at McKinley,” Artie says. “But, you know. In Sue Sylvester language.”

They can all imagine.

“I- If anyone c-can handle an im- imp- a surprise audition, it’s a Wa-Warbler,” Tina says, as they make their way to the choir room.

And she has a point. Blaine has his reasons for caring whether or not one of their new students this year came from Dalton, but for the others, it’s all about what having a potential ex-Warbler in the New Directions could do for their show choir. 

Blaine thinks it’s kind of sad, all of the interest his friends have in the boy’s assumed talent, when Blaine hasn’t heard anyone else express interest in the boy himself - like he and his abilities are two separate things. But at least no one at McKinley is interested in him for a more morbid reason. No one’s talking about the Dalton Academy fire like it’s hot gossip - McKinley High isn’t like that.

Beacon Hills isn’t like that, actually. No one talks about really bad things when they happen, after they’ve stopped happening. Even Sam tiptoes around talking about what happened to Blaine freshman year, what happened with his parents. Beacon Hights - the sort of rundown neighborhood on the farthest north side of town - sees a lot of one car traffic accidents and missing persons cases, but nobody Blaine knows ever seems to talk about that. Hunting and camping accidents happen a lot out on the Preserve (which Blaine realizes is probably why Sam and his family aren’t as comfortable spending time there as Blaine and his family were.) But the Beacon Hills Gazette doesn’t even write about it when they do. The “incidents” are just listed along with all of the town’s weddings, births, deaths, and prosecutions in the Events section near the back.

“Hiya, Killer,” Sebastian says in passing, as he walks by Blaine just as Blaine and his friends are almost to the choir room.

“Hey, Sebastian,” Blaine says back, lost enough in his thoughts not to remember that look and that wink from just this morning and get awkward about it, although he feels warm hearing the nickname, as he always does. 

Sebastian keeps right on moving, and so does Blaine, so he doesn’t realize at first that Sam, Tina, and Artie have all stopped dead in their tracks in the middle of the hallway. When Blaine does he does a double-take, looks around, and then walks back to where his friends are each staring at him, Tina with a literally dropped jaw.

“Guys, what-”

“What was _that_?” Sam asks.

Blaine looks back over his shoulder, truly confused. “I don’t know what you’re-”

“You and the new kid,” Artie clarifies. “Why didn’t you say you two have already met?”

“And why did he just call you a _killer_?” Sam says. 

“That’s not what-” Blaine starts to explain, then realizes that he doesn’t actually _want_ to give them the same explanation Sebastian gave him for his nickname. And now his face is _definitely_ burning. “It’s just a silly nickname. It’s what he calls me,” Blaine switches tracks and says instead. “And I guess it just hasn’t come up.”

“Blaine, we were j-just talking about him!” Tina finally recovers well enough to say.

“No,” Blaine immediately misuderstands. “No, we were just-” And then he catches on, oh, oh so late.

Getting a new student after the first day of classes for the year isn’t that uncommon at McKinley - but it’s not all that _common_ either. People aren’t exactly pouring into Beacon Hills, at all times of the year - much less with kids a year or two away from graduation. Much less with kids exactly two years away from graduation, with exactly the same sixth period, who skipped out on the second half of their first day at exactly the same time...

Sebastian Smythe isn’t just a new kid at school - he’s the new kid Tina and the others have been talking about, the one who used to go to Dalton.

Blaine is an idiot.

“I am... such an idiot,” he says out loud. Artie smirks at him.

“Seriously, B-Blaine?” Tina says, apparently seeing less humor in the lost opportunity for more accurate gossip in a more timely fashion.

“How does he even know you?” Sam asks, apparently not seeing any humor at all. He’s been frowning since Sebastian walked away, Blaine realizes.

Blaine doesn’t see Sam’s problem, but he answers anyhow. “We have AP Bio together. We met yesterday.”

Sam looks like he wants to ask Blaine something else - but just then they hear Coach Sue screaming from inside of her office, which is attached to the choir room (“What do I have to do, send out engraved invitations? Don’t wait for the tardy bell, you losers! Get your butts in here!)

“T-this is not over, B-Blaine Anderson,” Tina promises with a mock glare, wheeling Artie past him as Artie laughs and Blaine rolls his eyes. He and Sam hurry after them, Sam falling silent.

Blaine gives him a couple of concerned glances but knows that whatever is bugging Sam will come out sooner or later. If Artie is their Tina-whisperer, then Blaine is certainly the one most fluent in Sam speak. And right now Sam’s silence sounds to Blaine the same way Sam had back when he and Brittany thought they’d figured out the date of the _real_ Mayan apocalypse. 

Blaine just hopes that, this time, Sam speaks up in actual words before Blaine has to help him research how to annul another Mayan moon ritual. Then he tries to give Sam his space to be moody, because in the choir room Blaine finds something much more... immediate to be concerned about.

Sue starts off their sixth period class with her usual pep talk of back-handed compliments, barely veiled barbs at the show choir community, laments over having been “railroaded into supporting this academic lollygagging”, and vague directions as to how they should all spend their hour. Except today she leaves off the directions, and instead she says, “And since he was unable to grace us all with his presence yesterday, _Sebastian Smythe_ -

“Do I have that right, Sebastian?” Sue asks, then moves on before Sebastian has a chance to answer. “Aw, I don’t care. Hightop here is going to give us all an impromptu performance so we can decide whether or not he has the chops to join our merry little band of misfits and music-related first offenders.”

Sebastian weathers a full dose of direct Sue pretty well, for just having met her. He touches his hair and glances down at his shoes as if trying to figure out where she got the monicker ‘Hightop’ from, but otherwise does nothing but smirk before walking over to the students on instrumental who always sit with their instruments on the platform at the back of the room, without a word to the rest of the class.

He’s finished setting up a mic by the time everyone else in class has settled in and the instrumentals are ready, then he gives them a nod. 

The tune they start to play is instantly recognizable by everyone in the room, and a few whoops and hollers sound out around the class. Sebastian smiles in response.

And _that_ \- That is what Sebastian looks like when he’s really smiling, not just trying to smile - however convincingly - for an audience. The way he’s smiling now and the way Blaine still thinks he smiled at Blaine at first... It makes Blaine’s heart thump to see it.

Then Sebastian sings the song he has the instrumentals playing... and he looks right at Blaine for most of it.

“ _My mama told me when I was young, we are all born superstars... She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on in the glass of her boudoir..._ ”

Oh, _god_ , does he sing. He has a strong, smooth tenor that never goes pitchy or weak on the changes. He has a range that would make Lady Gaga proud, and he sings with passion. He even _adds_ attitude to the chorus.

“ _I’m beautiful in my way_ ,” Sebastian seems to sing like he’s making an argument “‘Cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way...”

He dances around the classroom gracefully, working his movements around the mic without even looking for the chord, singing to and with various students, not just Blaine - like Kitty, the Instrumentals, Tina, Ryder, and Sugar. 

He keeps coming back to Blaine, though. “ _I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to be brave,_ ” he sings while basically staring into Blaine’s eyes, an oddly serious glint to his gaze.

Sam stays quiet throughout it all, and Tina never sings anything she hasn’t practiced (for competitions, she always dances and provides background chorals), but most of the class is singing along by the time Sebastian finishes, leaving off Gaga’s last two lines.

“ _I was born this way, hey!_  
I was born this way, hey...  
I’m on the right track, baby,  
I was born this way!”

Blaine is pretty sure he’s making heart eyes at Sebastian throughout the whole second movement... because he is in love.

When the instrumentals stop playing, and Sebastian lowers his mic, the whole choir claps and cheers. Some kids stand and holler.

“My sweet Lord _Jesus_ , that was awful,” Coach Sue says before the applause has even died down. “But the show choir judges will love it. Welcome to the New Directions, kid. My condolences.”

Sebastian catches Blaine’s eye over some of their classmates, who have crowded around to welcome the new guy officially, and he grins.

It’s another one of his _show_ smiles, Blaine decides to call them, but he’ll take it.

“Okay, so he doesn’t sound half bad,” Blaine hears Sam concede to Tina.

“He’s amazing,” Blaine pitches in, without looking away from Sebastian or having heard the rest of their conversation.

He’s sure he’s just imagining it - the acoustics in this room are unbeatable, and the class is being really, really loud - but it’s almost like Sebastian hears him. His smile actually touches his eyes for a moment, and then Sebastian looks away.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

Blaine’s eighth period class is more of a work period than an actual class. Technically, Blaine is signed up for Spanish III, but his Spanish is flawless, so instead he does some paperwork and filing and other sorts of tasks for Mr. Schuester, McKinley’s only Spanish teacher. Sometimes, he even gets paid for his trouble. Schue transcribes old films and audio recordings for the library his wife works at, and for online clients who pay, and when Blaine helps him out with those, he splits the profit with Blaine. 

During the school day, McKinley students who are done with their work in whatever class they have will request to go to other classes for tutoring, and when those students come to Mr. Schue, Blaine works with them too. 

Today Blaine is trying his hardest to make up for all the daydreaming yesterday by really keeping his head down and working through the stack of papers Schue has given him, and so far he’s been successful. Blaine doesn’t know what’s different about this afternoon, compared to yesterday’s - or even first period today - but he hasn’t had another incident of “wolfing out”.

The first time he’s afraid he will, in fact, comes when he hears a voice he wasn’t expecting to hear again today, just as he’s adding the stresses and notations to the last stanza of a long, exotic-sounding chant Schue asked him to transcribe. (Blaine has no idea what the Beacon Hills Library is going to do with a dozen audio files of _chants_ , spoken in a language Blaine doesn’t even know the name of... Schue told him just to note the sounds with English phonetic symbols, and Blaine doesn’t make his fifty-bucks-whenever by questioning Schue’s directions.)

Through his headphones and the last word of the chant, Blaine hears Mr. Schue say, “Oh, hello, Sebastian. I’m glad you could come by.”

“Of course. I appreciate you taking the time to help me catch up, Mr. Schuester,” he hears Sebastian say in return.

The point of Blaine’s pencil sinks through the paper he’s writing on. And through the whole stack of papers sitting underneath that. Blaine pretends that he hasn’t heard anything (because he probably shouldn’t have) but he ruffles his papers slightly, so that the depth of the hole isn’t so noticeable.

“Actually, my student aide is going to be helping you today, if that’s alright with you,” he hears Schue continue. “Blaine knows the material about as well as I do. He can help you go over what we’ve already done in class so far, and you can check back with me if you have any questions that Blaine couldn’t answer.”

“Fine by me,” Sebastian responds. “If you’re talking about Blaine Anderson, he and I have a couple of classes together... I’m sure he can give me exactly what I need.”

Blaine can’t _not_ look up at that, and when he finds Sebastian already smirking in his direction, he can only hope that Sebastian reads whatever _must_ be on Blaine’s face as surprise at having looked up to find someone else in the room with him and Schue.

Blaine tugs off his headphones. Sebastian is even making suggestive comments to Blaine when _he doesn’t think Blaine can hear him_. Maybe Blaine was hasty in deciding that Sebastian hasn’t been flirting with him seriously.

“Uh... right,” Mr. Schuester says after probably half the time that any other teacher would have. Schue always seems so hard to fluster. “Blaine, Sebastian here needs to catch up on what he missed last week,” Schue turns to Blaine raises his voice to be heard from across the room. “Can you walk him through Syllabus 4?”

“Um. Sure. Sure, Mr. Schue.”

If Blaine isn’t blushing _again_ he sounds like he should be. Why can’t his newfound lycanthropy give him advanced blood circulation in his face? 

And why are the prettiest boys always the _wrong_ kind of pain in the ass?

Blaine grumbles to himself under his breath so he can’t be heard as he puts his transcription supplies away, but even vulgar venting doesn’t make him feel less off-put. 

At least he catches Sebastian nearly trip over his own feet halfway to Blaine’s desk in the back, so he knows that the other boy isn’t one hundred percent perfect, perfectly cocky and collected, _all_ of the time.

About half of the time Blaine spends helping Sebastian, Sebastian behaves himself completely, so Blaine has actually begun to believe that maybe Sebastian’s gotten his maybe-serious-but-maybe-not flirting out of the way for the day. 

And Sebastian is no less fascinating when he isn’t practically _breathing_ sex and mischief in Blaine’s general direction. In fact, he might be even more fascinating. He’s funny and he’s quick-witted; he has a great laugh, and he tells great stories while he writes down the information Blaine points out for him, between each review Blaine shares with him.

At Sebastian’s old school (that’s how he says it - “my old school”, Dalton isn’t named) they offered French, and that was what Sebastian studied there. Sebastian’s mom actually lives in France, and he spends most of his summers there, so French was a natural choice.

“I’d love to learn French,” Blaine shares. “My mom is Filipino, and we always spoke that in my house as much as English... so Spanish just makes sense. But French sounds so... So-”

“So out there?” Sebastian suggests, with one quirked brow and a tilt of his lips.

Blaine laughs at having his own words given back to him.

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You don’t even know a little bit of French?” Sebastian asks, stretching back in his chair. 

He so likes doing that. Of course, after just two days of knowing him, Blaine is nowhere near okay with it, but at least his brain functions more and more normally with each exposure.

“I know ‘bonjour’... and ‘merci’. And s’il vous plait...,” Blaine lists his French vocabulary in its entirety. Sebastian wrinkles his nose at Blaine’s pronunciations, and Blaine slaps him on the shoulder without thinking about it. “And ‘je suis’,” he adds, remembering the bumper stickers Cooper had covered his and their parents’ bumpers with several years ago.

Sebastian looks like he wants to laugh at Blaine... but he’s waiting for something first.

Finally he gives Blaine an incredulous look and asks, “Je suis _what_?” 

Even those few syllables in French sound _ridiculously_ sexy in Sebastian’s voice.

Blaine remembers Cooper’s bumper stickers and wishes he hadn’t brought that one up. “Um... Charlie?”

Sebastian _does_ laugh at Blaine - he even throws back his head when he does it.

But when he straightens back up, he has that same careful look in his eyes he gets when he really lays on the flirting thick. Like he’s _trying_ to keep things from being serious. Like he’s trying to make it a game so the stakes of actually having someone flirt back don’t seem so important.

Blaine gets that. After Freshman year, he was sorta like that. (No one flirts via flash mob if he takes himself too seriously.) After Kurt, he maybe understands only too well. But.

Blaine decides it in that moment - he’s tired of letting things that have happened to him control so much of what happens to him. So much of what _he_ makes happen. He was tired when he met Kurt, of treating his feelings for boys like a game so they wouldn’t hurt him so much, and now he’s tired of treating them like a warning sign. 

Whether its the violence of some homophobic assholes, or the heartbreak of losing his first real love, or the bite of a werewolf - Blaine doesn’t want anything holding him back from being who he wants to be any longer. 

And maybe if he can find the courage to actually live by that decision... Sebastian will too.

At least if he doesn’t, Blaine won’t have to add any more regrets about the things he _could_ have done to his regrets about the things that have been done to him.

Mr. Schue just so happens to pick that moment to leave the room for some copies he sent downstairs, and Blaine doesn’t waste the opportunity. Blaine looks Sebastian in the eyes, lets a soft smile form freely on his face, and encourages him.

“So speak some real French to me,” he says.

He obviously catches Sebastian off-guard, but the other boy recovers quickly enough. He looks to the door Mr. Schue just walked out of, then to Blaine’s probably rapidly reddening face, and his smile becomes slyer than Blaine’s seen yet. He raises a brow as if to say ‘Seriously?’ Blaine doesn’t back down.

“Hmm. Okay...,” Sebastian says, stretching out again in his seat - this time with his upper body turned towards Blaine, leaned in so close that smell of clean skin and cotton, and leather and earth, reaffirms itself to Blaine’s senses, makes him feel heady from more than just adrenaline.

Sebastian seems to sharpen his gaze on Blaine’s face. “ _Ou puis-je faire un appel a la maison, s’il vous plait_ ,” he says in the most beautiful accent.

Blaine honestly feels a little breathless, just from hearing those few words more in Sebastian’s chosen language.

“What does that mean?”

Sebastian’s intense expression holds... and then breaks, and he holds up one of the papers Blaine gave him for homework tonight. “ _Where may I make a call home, please_?” he reads off of the worksheet. It’s one of the sentences he’s supposed to write in Spanish for practice.

Blaine rolls his eyes and Sebastian laughs.

But Sebastian is still looking at Blaine closer than he was before, and when his expression turns serious again, Blaine somehow knows he isn’t just playing around when he says, “ _Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent._ ”

Blaine waits for Sebastian to translate the words for him, just in case he _is_ messing with Blaine once more, but Sebastian just keeps watching him. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t smile or laugh.

The intensity of the way he’s looking at Blaine starts to get to him in fact. Blaine can’t stop dropping his gaze to Sebastian’s smart mouth. And Sebastian’s nearness is inconveniently doing terrible things to the luck Blaine’s been enjoying for most of the day - making him feel again like he might wolf out at any moment. 

Blaine either has to speak or kiss Sebastian... and if he does the latter, he’s not entirely sure it won’t be with a mouth full of too-sharp teeth.

“And what was that? You asking for directions to the kitchen?” Blaine tries to tease, to lighten the moment.

Surprisingly, Sebastian doesn’t let him right away. “You really don’t know?” His green eyes roam Blaine’s face like he’s looking for proof there that Blaine’s just been pretending not to know a third language.

“I wasn’t exaggerating my only knowing, like, four French words,” Blaine tells him honestly. “Well. I guess it’s more like three.”

And _still_ Sebastian stares at him a moment more before leaning back. Without a hint of teasing in his voice, he says - almost like he doesn’t mean to, “I don’t know what to do about you, Blaine Anderson.”

That’s- That’s a really odd thing for him to have said.

But before Blaine can questions it, the last bell of the day rings. Blaine looks away to see if Mr. Schue has returned - he’s been so distracted by Sebastian, he wouldn’t know - and when he looks back, Sebastian has swept out of his seat as gracefully as he (usually) does anything.

Blaine’s expecting another cocky, ‘See you later, Killer’ - for whatever spell had fallen over the both of them, the second Sebastian started speaking French to Blaine, to lift. But Sebastian stands over Blaine for a moment and quietly studies him.  
“ _Je voudrais que tu n’es pas ce que tu es_ ,” Sebastian says at last and walks out.

Blaine’s pretty sure none of those words were a goodbye.

 

|O|O|O|O|O|O|

 

The next few days are a weird mix of hot and cold, terrifying and _thrilling_ moments that Blaine isn’t entirely sure how to piece together by the time the weekend approaches.

Wednesday morning, Sam wakes Blaine up while it’s still dark outside and tells him that his dad never came home last night - didn’t call or leave a message to say that he’d be working late. Frantic, the both of them dress and take a red-eyed car ride downtown to the sheriff’s office in Blaine’s car because Sam is too shaken to drive.

The Sheriff is fine - they spot him through the cluster of deputies grouped around an evidence board in the small building’s front briefing room, through the large glass windows that line the space.

As soon as he sees Sam barreling across the room for him he says, “Damn. I’m sorry, son - boys. I should have called-”

“Yeah, you should have,” Sam says, and then he crushes his dad into a hug.

Since Sam’s mom left, Sam’s been more protective of his dad than ever.

It turns out someone found a body in the northernmost part of the Reserve, and the sheriff’s department has been waiting for a positive i.d. Sam’s dad thinks it might be a missing person that was reported a little over a week ago - a young man from one town over, just a couple of years older than Sam and Blaine. A young man who has someone missing him; someone Sam’s dad will have to call and give the bad news if the M.E. makes the identification that Sheriff Evans thinks she’s going to make.

“I’ve just been so distracted, thinking about that boy...” Sheriff Evans says. “It won’t happen again, Sam. I really am sorry.”

“No. No, I know, Dad,” Sam is quick to reassure him, once they know the situation. “I totally get it. This is awful.”

“It really, really is.”

Blaine is absolutely exhausted by the time he and Sam get to school, but Mrs. Baker is watching him too hawkishly for him to doze off in her class.

Which is both a good and a bad thing - good because what if Blaine has another sleepwalking dream if he falls asleep at school? And, exhausted, Blaine doesn’t feel any of the itchy, twitchy restlessness he’s had to worry about for two days. (During football practice yesterday, Blaine was in the tackle line the whole time, instead of riding a sled. And he was so worried about accidentally using wolf strength and hurting Samuelson, he kept barely nudging the sled, catching Sue’s eye and causing her to yell at him. With the next tackle, Blaine broke the padded rest off of the sled and its tracks altogether, with Samuelson still attached. Sue made Blaine captain of the team.)

But it’s bad because Blaine’s hairgel isn’t working _at all_ anymore, and Blaine doesn’t even have the energy to use alternative products, so his curls are on the very cusp of breaking free when he drags his feet into AP Bio.

“Whoa, Killer... I dig the just out of bed look,” Sebastian greets him much too cheerfully, from Blaine’s perspective. “Should I be jealous about _why_ you look like you didn’t do any sleeping in yours?”

He’s acting like yesterday’s weird end to their tutoring session eighth period never happened, and Blaine’s more than happy to play along. 

“Just- Had some... family stuff come up,” Blaine says, definitely not mentioning that the “stuff” was a terrible case Sam’s family, Sam’s dad, has to solve. Who wants to know about such a young guy getting murdered and left in the woods like that? Blaine’s been bitten by a literal _monster_ , and he wishes _he_ didn’t know that bad things like that can happen in real life. To real people right here in Beacon Hills, Ohio.

“Right. Family stuff,” Sebastian says skeptically, but he drops it. Then the office calls him out of class, and Blaine doesn’t see him for the rest of the day.

Wednesday night, Blaine dreams again.

This time he _definitely_ dreams about Sebastian before he dreams about the wolf.

They’re back in Mr. Schue’s room... and Sebastian has arched his neck as he laughs.

Blaine leans forward and kisses him gently right on top of his adam’s apple. Sebastian says something sexy and smooth, in that accent - in _French_ \- and Blaine starts to nibble at his skin.

Then bite.

Then Blaine’s fangs descend...

...and Blaine is running through the woods again, but this time, it’s not _from_ the wolf. 

Blaine is desperately, _desperately_ trying to find it. To find _him_. Where is he? Blaine drops to the earth, lowers his snout right to the soil and the damp leaves that litter it, but he can’t pick up a scent. He can’t hear a thing in the woods. It’s like his wolf - his alpha, his _pack_ \- has completely abandoned him.

Or like something has taken him away from Blaine.

Blaine throws back his head and howls, in fury and in torment-

At least Blaine wakes up in his bed this time.

But when he kicks back his sheets, his feet are covered in mud and leaves, which he’s drug into bed with him.

Sam is shrieking from his room down the hall.

“Dude! It’s fucking four o’clock in the morning! Are you fucking _howling_!?”

Thursday is like a repeat of Tuesday except nothing happens in English III, and Sebastian isn’t at school again. Friday morning at school the thing with Sebastian finally blows up.

Finally. Has Blaine only known Sebastian Smythe for a week? Every moment between them just feels so intense...

Blaine always cuts through the west stairwell between first and second period to get from English III and AP Bio. It’s older and smellier - the original stairwell between the first through third floors from back when the school was one, tall structure, before it was expanded in one direction, and then later in two others, when the north and south wings of the school were added.

None of the doors in the west stairwell shut all the way unless they stick when they do, and half the lights flicker if you smack your hand hard enough against the walls. Few students use this stairwell, unless they’re looking for somewhere to wait for the halls to clear so they can sneak up to the third floor lab to skip for a period, or out of the building through the front to skip for the rest of a day. There are a lot better places on campus for students to hook up, make out or get high.

Which isn’t to say that _no one_ besides Blaine uses the west stairwell, ever, so when Blaine hears footsteps above him on the stairs, he doesn’t think anything of it.

“Blaine.”

Sebastian’s voice, when Blaine hears it, he has thoughts about.

“I should have done this sooner,” Sebastian says. 

Sebastian’s first class isn’t on the third floor. Did he go up to find Blaine and follow him back down?

Blaine pauses with his hand on the door handle for his floor, heart rabbiting as he considers what Sebastian might be saying he should have done.

A hand on Blaine’s shoulder gives him his answer. Before Blaine can turn, Sebastian has spun him around and against the wall next to the door, unseen from anyone who might pass by the entrance to the stairwell, with its tiny, age-fogged window. 

There are so many ways Blaine could respond. 

While romantic, being spun into a wall isn’t the most... normal way to be confronted by a boy who wants to kiss you. Blaine could ask what Sebastian thinks he’s doing, and try to laugh off the weirdness of the situation. He should probably act startled. Someone who _hasn’t_ recently been bitten by a werewolf probably wouldn’t have heard Sebastian coming, would they have? Sebastian seems to move very quickly very quietly. Even Blaine didn’t hear him at first.

But Blaine’s never wanted to be kissed so badly before - and this morning Blaine’s felt as itchy and restless as he had Tuesday morning. He’s had to try so hard not to let his focus drift to a sound that might startle him into popping his claws. He’s had to be very careful not to think about anything scary or upsetting enough into making his teeth go sharp like they have before in practice. Blaine knows how to be cautious - particularly after freshman year - but he hasn’t ever really been what someone might call _restrained_.

Blaine reaches immediately for Sebastian, takes that handsome face in his hands and kisses Sebastian before Sebastian has the chance to follow through with kissing him. Sebastian goes entirely, almost eerily still. But Blaine doesn’t even notice. It feels insanely good to give in to a thing he’s feeling, for once, rather than to fight it.

When Sebastian unfreezes, though... almost _growls_ into the kiss, his hands on top of Blaine’s as if to stop Blaine from changing his mind and pulling away, and kisses Blaine back-

That feels even better.

It’s the hottest kiss Blaine can remember having in a long time - if ever.

Too hot, really, for the west stairwell when the tardy bell is about to ring any second. They’re kissing with open mouths and tentative tongues, and Sebastian’s body presses into Blaine’s - such long, lean muscle and heat and-

Blaine has to tear himself away when his gums startle to tingle worse than they ever have before.

He has to tear himself _all_ the way away, in fact. In his panic, he just manages to be gentle and not shove Sebastian away from him. He has to race out of the stairwell without saying a word, and he’s around two corners and hiding out in the boy’s restroom down that hall before he can even process the shock-stricken look on Sebastian’s face.

His own face is his biggest concern, however. In the empty restroom, Blaine stands in front of one of the mirrors and - after steeling himself for what he might see - carefully curls his lips back over the thickness he suddenly feels - in his gums, and against his tongue...

He’s felt his... his _fangs_ drop before, out on the football field, but he’s never seen them. They’ve never fully formed when Blaine wasn’t wearing a helmet and biting down on a mouthgaurd. Even then, they’ve never _remained_ , not retracted, _whatever_ for more than a few moments... And they are-

Blaine stumbles away from the mirror, panting.

“No... no, this can’t be happening,” he recites and tries to breathe. His voice sounds slurred around his inhuman teeth. 

This _literally_ cannot be happening. He cannot walk out of this restroom with _fangs_.

Blaine rubs at his mouth, but the thickness doesn’t fade. He reaches for his phone, to text Sam - if anything counts as an emergency, _this_ does - but when Blaine has it in his hands... his claw-tipped hands... he can’t operate his messenger with his fear-clumsy fingers, and he scratches right through his screen protector.

Blaine crawls into one of the restroom stalls and locks the stall door, then climbs up onto the tank of the toilet, out of sight, to breathe and clutch his useless phone and try to think.

(About anything besides the fact that this is much more time and exposure than Blaine would ever prefer to spend in a boys’ public bathroom.)

Blaine isn’t entirely sure how much time passes before his phone buzzes in his hands, nearly startling Blaine into dropping it. Two bells have rung, and traffic through the restroom has come and gone until Blaine is alone again.

‘i can’t figure you out,’ reads the text from an unknown number, which pops up as a notification on this homescreen. And, after Blaine does nothing but stare at the it, it’s followed by, ‘i don’t know what you want.’

It’s distracting enough that, after a few more breaths, Blaine realizes that he’s actually holding his phone again in entirely human-looking hands. 

‘i got your number from the girl with the stutter,’ a third text says, and this time Blaine answers back.

‘Tina? Who is this?’

‘Sure. This is Sebastian.’

Sebastian. After kissing him, Blaine had practically fled without any warning - any explanation. And instead of just writing Blaine off as either a weirdo or a tease, Sebastian’s bothering to text Blaine to ask him about it. He bothered to get Blaine’s number so he could text him.

‘Sebastian I’ Blaine texts before knowing how he could possibly follow that up in a way to explain his disappearing act in the stairwell. Without telling the truth and admitting that he _is_ a weirdo. Or, worse, a mostly-werewolf. ‘Sebastian I am so sorry. I’m... kinda going through some stuff right now.’

‘Family stuff?’ Sebastian texts back almost immediately.

‘Sorta,’ Blaine texts, since that’s the excuse he gave for his sleepless night the other day. And from what he and Sam have read, to most werewolves pack is family. 

Blaine hasn’t given up on the decision he made the other day in Schue’s class. ‘I really like you,’ he texts. What just happened was-

It was scary. But he and Sam have continued researching his situation. They’ll keep researching. There has to be something that new werewolves can do so they don’t have to hide out in bathrooms whenever kissing a pretty boy gets to be overwhelming.

Sebastian doesn’t text back.

‘I’m sorry I ran,’ Blaine tries again.

The fifth period bells ring, and boys file in and out of the restroom, occasionally rattling the door to Blaine’s stall before moving on. Blaine’s teeth feel like they’ve gone back to normal, too, but he doesn’t move. 

And eventually Sebastian texts ‘Sorry I scared you.’

Blaine feels like he’s holding his breath until Sebastian texts again. ‘i like you too, Blaine.’

Blaine goes for broke. ‘Go out with me.’

Then he sees the words on his screen and almost wishes he could call them back. 

‘Where?’ Sebastian asks before Blaine can spiral into another freak-out.

 _Where_? Blaine blanks of all actual places that he and Sebastian could go. When he thinks of one it’s just because the New Finchel and Friends have been talking about it so much-

‘Kitty has that party tonight. Go with me’ Blaine types and hits send before he even sees the lack of question mark in what he’s typed.

A flurry of sudden texts from Sam interrupts his thoughts on that -

‘Everything okay, B?’

‘Blaine?’

‘Artie and Tina said they haven’t seen you all morning. Bro, what’s up?’

‘Hold, on Sam,’ Blaine texts. ‘Talking to Sebastian.’

Sebastian finally says: ‘Looking forward to it, Killer :)’

‘BLAINE WHERE R U??’ Sam texts at basically the same time. 

Blaine grins so wide and so quick, if he _had_ fangs at the moment, he’d probably cut himself. Sebastian is going to go with him to the party Blaine heard that Sebastian told Kitty he wasn’t even sure he would attend. Sebastian is going _with_ Blaine, on a date. Holy shit.

‘IS HE STILL THERE? BLAINE?’ Sam continues to text.

‘Just texting,’ Blaine answers him. ‘I’m on the first floor restroom near Lab 2.’

‘i’ll be right there. DON’T LEAVE,’ Sam texts. Blaine has no idea what’s gotten into him, but he says that he isn’t going anywhere. Sebastian agreed to go out with Blaine. As far as Blaine’s concerned, the day may as well be over. He’s gotten more out of it than he could have possibly expected.

More than he realizes when Sam suggests they do something they haven’t done since Sheriff Evans made his deal with Principal Figgins and skip the rest of the school day - even the detention Figgins gave Blaine the other day and practice with Sue.

Because once they’re home Sam explains exactly why Blaine’s text freaked him out.

He shoves a printout into Blaine’s hand - a rough black and white copy of a photo of an old carving, engraved with some vaguely familiar French words, stylized like a banner waving above a man and a woman armed with rifles and bows. Familiar to Blaine because these are some of the words Sebastian said to Blaine just the other day.

_Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent._

On the printout, the caption of the photo translates the words into English.

‘We hunt those who hunt us.’

“ _Dude_!” Sam says. “ _Sebastian Smythe_ is a werewolf hunter!”


End file.
